Admin

I think that's what we're all saying.

realistme is around (I think). that was actually the one and only issue we had on the Proboard before moving to SMF. Was realistme stuff. And then she/he said they weren't coming back and I said I thought maybe that was a good thing. And then they came back and were like "okay ima just lurk because u suck" and then they - started posting again. Not sure what happened after that. haven't really noticed them around. I sincerely hope Pinkfrog doesn't come here. Icarus I don't care. I still don't really get why everybody didn't like that guy. I guess I get why the Trump supporters didn't like him.

so - you're mad because - of - i don't get it.

I'm basically the only power that be for this place. And the only instruction I ever gave anybody about anything was "invite whoever you want". If I knew the board was going down, I probably would have tried to sneak a link in so everybody could find it. you know who I was thinking about yesterday? Packard.

at the time I was looking for testers for a media type board and so the people I approached were people I thought might be into that. I have no problem with pretty much anybody from ASMB posting here, but it didn't seem like something you'd be into. is it?

Zintar just went through that house buying thing.

I think the Trump factor is what makes 2016 10000x worse than 2009. a lot of deaths AND concentration camps vs a lot of deaths and no concentration camps at all for anything. And - we sort of joke about concentration camps - but there are seriously a lot of parallels I think between Trump and more importantly is constituency's view and potential policy that may derive from that vs Mexicans and Muslims. Which very much mirrors in its way the Nazi doctrine vs Gypsies (kind of the Mexicans of Europe) and ironically the Jews (who were similarly scapegoated as Muslims are now). And yeah, it's kind of - can seem silly/paranoid for people to think stuff like that could actually happen, but - it's happened before. And not because some evil dude swept into power and made people do stuff against their wills. Constituencies were swayed. People actively supported the doctrine. Many of those that didn't, also didn't speak out. "Never again" is a very important historical idiom. So - it does seem a little "over-reacty" to me sometimes. But even still, I have no real problem with a little paranoia directed at that particular situation. It may even actually be required. But I'd rather have it be an over-reaction to nothing, than no reaction at all to something that gets away from us before we notice it and react to it.

Happy New Year!

yeah that was kind of how I saw it, was more perennial. Like it would just always be there.

you were one of my first people. You were in that group with Pat and Zintar and Viper and KN.

it was pretty dull for the most part. when Lithium first started, it was super fun in there. We had lots of just - dumb posts about stupid stuff. But I think that started to evolve when admins became less and less available. Without an admin presence, mods were sort of starting to argue more. And also I think that led to more back-and-forths between mods and users. Which escalated to fairly disastrous proportions with the great Lithium board hax. With that - the mod board was deleted. Which - if it initially started out fun, and then gradually became a bit more contentious, after the deletion, it was pretty generally downcast, without quite the same life that either previous sets of conditions provided. I think the ghost of all the missing posts and SNs (retired mods and admins, all of whoms posts were then gone), helped contribute to a general lack of interest in posting on the mod board. Or - sort of a subconscious thing where it wasn't as fun or something. I think possibly that's also one of the contributors to the NodeBB fail, is - users were a bit bereft without the old board posts, including those from old users they missed that were no longer around. And admins kind of returned, and with that, sort of a return to initial moderating principles/standards. And we lost some mods and gradually over time, the boards just were advertised less and less, so - while my initial thought was "yeah things are kind of dull/morose atm, but it'll pick up again" it sort of never quite did. As the audience shrunk, fewer mods logged on just as fewer users logged on. So the mod board was generally much less active and thereby much less fun and/or interesting. And it just sort of continued along those lines I think til the NodeBB switch. Well, there was that one bit where they added the Helpers, that did make things fun again. But even then, the Helper board was always way more active and fun than the mod board. so it was okay, even up til the end. I mean, it wasn't awful or anything. But it was never quite as fun as it was those first years.

no but while - it's not necessarily - like we can't say with 100% certainty, the last year paints a pretty clear picture. To me at least. I mean - it was clear that after Lithium they were dead set on a message board. Because they actually had a deal in place, and they abandoned that because the entity couldn't produce a working message board as part of the package. My understanding is that's basically the only reason they abandoned that. So - at least at the start, they were pretty much sold on keeping a message board. I think the problems came when - first of all - when you shift software packages - there's going to be problems. There are going to be technical issues, and people aren't going to like it at first. So - none of that was really taken into account. They had execs poking their noses in and being all "artistic visiony" about it. Which - as soon as I first heard the phrase, I sensed we were in trouble. So - we had new software, that handled differently - a new layout, which nobody was going to like or want to use, and - on top of that, the switch coincided with basically the last of the admins being shipped off to other projects. So - none of the admins we previously knew were connected to the boards anymore. So we had entirely new people, that had no idea what the board was or what the community was or how it worked, basically completely changing the board and then - just - probably not happy with the reaction they got. I get the impression that - well there was a clear investment in an aesthetic. One that nobody wanted. And I think the perveyers of that aesthetic possibly tended to blame the users maybe? The only other option would be to - admit the aesthetic didn't work. Which is kind of like admitting failure. And in the past, that's kind of how things rolled. It was like "okay hey let's do this" "It's not working" "eh okay let's try something else". NodeBB was a complete departure from that. It, and the new admins, were basically "we're doing this, we're doing it this way, so suck it audience". And it didn't work. And I think - with Lazzo in charge, he - obviously, he's open to the boards existence, or he would have scuttled it back when he took over. But I think there were always, not just one, but multiple admins around to act as a buffer between Lazzo and the community to sort of provide the arguments for its existence. With all of the old admins gone, I think all that left was a combination of people who were so green they didn't know anything, and people who had clearly mishandled the project such that it probably would be easier to end it than to continue to wear it around their necks like an albatross (since they seemed unable to yield to changing it such that it could actually be successful again). So when the subject came up - it was probably like "well so what to do about this message board", the answer was "devote more resources to it/put somebody on it that can actually fix it" or something along those lines or "axe it and move on". And I think, with nobody left to make the cogent argument for the board, business-wise, there's not a lot of - room for speculation there to me in terms of - it's more like "why wouldn't they axe the board". There just was literally no reason not to. My take on it is that - I think Lazzo would have gone for a board if the switch had gone better and been handled better. Because - there was a commitment going into Nodebb to maintain a message board for Adult Swim. But to facilitate that, I think there probably needed to be some sort of voice there that no longer existed to suggest or point out the reasons for continuing to have a board. with no such voice, I don't think there was much room for a decision to continue it. It might have been different if there had been a Humbug or a Drew around to help it along. But without that, it was kind of just stuck in a ditch. And it could have been unstuck, but to do that, they would have had to put somebody capable on it. And I don't think they had anybody that wasn't otherwise engaged in other duties. so - I ultimately think it ended just because "wrong place/wrong time". That and the inability of execs to adjust to what users actually wanted. If there'd been a more of a spirit of commerce in the sense of - like instead of that rigid "this is what we're doing because artistic vision", more of an ability to go with the flow and adapt to the audience in order to expand the audience, it may have been different. But we had inexperienced project managers that didn't understand the board, at the worst possible time for that, coupled with fairly disastrous top down decision making that strangled board traffic. That's how I see it anyway.

I think at - like the most optimistic thing I can say about 2016 is that it laid a groundwork and kind of provided an example of - how not to do stuff. Kind of like a bad parent. I feel like, because 2016 was so shitty, there's perhaps a certain resolve there that - with the year being over, we can start trying to dig our way out of that - shitblizzard or whatever you want to call it. It was a shit year. But on some level I'm looking forward to turning that around for this new year. And there's something engaging about that.

awesome as fuck. https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/21/this-bitcoin-eating-plant-robot-hires-artists-to-make-its-babies/

decentralized web https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bittorrent-powered-zeronet-decentralized-web-pioneers-peer-to-peer-file-transfers-1457103175

due out March 2017

Mayday Games will be releasing this in the US this February.

2017 will see the release of a new Mysterium expansion which will feature new characters, new locations, and new items.

"Ruhr Valley" Expansion due out in 2017 expands the game with 2 new modules and 21 development tiles.

Hasbro's newly licensed version of Robo Rally snuck its way into stores late in 2016. Here's a review of the original Avalon Hill version.