Askia,
Sorry, but I still call bullshit on your figures. You continue to drastically underestimate the percentage of everything that is crap. Wide-eyed idealists like you get on my fucking nerves.
100% of the stuff I like is good, not crap. TO ME.
Some percentage of stuff I don’t care for may still be good, just not my personal taste, but some of it will indeed be crap.
Jump on that dildo and fuck it!
We already have.
Except that I admitted that I made my point quite badly to begin with, and Frank put it into words a bit better than I did.
Being lumped in with the bandwagonjumpers when you were there from the start is what REALLY gives me the sick.
I know that it is small-minded and childish to feel this way. Ah well.
More like fifteen months, but if you’d posted the same thing in 2002, I’d have laughed just as hard. Video games are probably the single most derivative and repetitve medium out there right now. It makes Hollywood look like a fount of creativty and originality. Last year, what were the most highly touted games? Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. All sequels, none of which departed significantly from the formulas set by their predecssors, and that was the cream of the crop. I’m not dissing those games (except Doom 3, which sucked) but the best the industry has to offer us is rehashes of the same thing they’ve been doing since the early nineties. There’s some innovation out there, mostly on the consoles (which is frankly bizarre, as that’s far and away the most corporate and tightly controlled format for video games out there). But for every Katamari Damacy there are fifteen re-iterations of Madden with virtually no changes at all except an updated player roster.
So, I guess that means I’m not a game fan? What the hell am I doing with all these game consoles and high-end PCs at home, then?
Yes, games are entertainment products. So are books, movies, songs, plays, paintings, sculptures, and any other art form you care to name. And like all those other art form, games are entirely capable of challenging our yaddas. But most of them don’t even try: they settle for flashing lights and pretty colors. I think they can do more.
There’s a difference between being a snob and having standards. Excepting more out of a video game, or a book, or a movie, or whatever, doesn’t make you a snob. Judging people’s worth based on what they like makes you a snob. There’s hardly anyone in this thread doing the latter, aside from the OP.
Sega Genesis? Pfft. All the cool people played it on PC.
When anything increases, the more the amount of crap increases (a ratio). The Dope isn’t that popular. But if it became popular overnight, then the crap level might increase to the point that the crappy posters would overtake the boards to the point the mods can’t keep up and the board would be full of crap. This would lead to many people leaving very quickly. The Dope would die because the ones left couldn’t keep out the crap, so they’d eventually get jaded and leave.
Now, apply that to anything. Apply it to our Johnny Cash scenario. Let’s just pretend he’s still alive and can give concerts. Because of his new popularity, more people go to his concerts, so the crap level goes up. Which means there is a boatload of people who try and singalong and get the lyrics wrong. Or an amount of people that are just going to the concert because their friends are, so they get bored and throw popcorn at people. You can see where this is going. I’ve seen this happen before with other things.
That is why people don’t like to see their favorite things hit the mainstream: the crap fans increase. And with the advent of the Internet, it gets unbearable. Spend some time being a fan of something that gets many young people. I can see how LotR fans are bitter - after the 800th Legolas/Urukhai rape fic…
I made a Lego™ Legolas!
But it’s a secret. A god damn secret, got that? Don’t fucking tell anyone…
The only time I’ve been bitter about things like this is when a favorite band of mine becomes too popular for their venue and so has to move on to bigger places. People have mentioned this before but I still don’t see how one shouldn’t be able to regret not being able to see them in the intimate surroundings they used to frequent.
Of course, I am one to talk, because I usually only go to medium-sized venues where people sometimes complain about no longer being able to see the bands at a bar anymore 
I used to think about this very subject back in the punk/post-punk/new wave era. As soon as an artist sold more than 100 records, their so-called “core” fans started bitching about their “sellout” and started searching for the next “little thing”. My message to them was the same as it is now–it’s called the music business for a reason! Artists get into it with the ultimate goal of eventually turning a buck. I you really like them, you should be happy that they’ve become successful rather than resentful that your elite little club has been breached by the plebeians.
I wonder if the early Beatles fans felt the same resentment when the Fab Four started dressing in suits and making millions? Any Brits have any recollection about that?
To the previous poster who’s been a Bears fan for 20 years: Dude, I lived in Tampa and went to Bucs games when they still had the gay pirate on their helmets! Loved them then, love them now!
Actually, the only thing that ever bothered me about “fringe” artists going mainstream was that it usually took a really lame song to finally get them the recognition they deserved: With or Without You by U2, You Take My Breath Away by Berlin, Every Breath You Take by The Police, etc.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not just the new people writing slash. Slash is a venerable tradition that started with the hardest-core of nerds.
That’s a really lame song? I’m pretty surprised that people would say that - I’ve always thought it was one of the best songs they ever did. I’m not a hardcore U2 fan, but I have five or six of their albums, so it’s not as though I’m only familiar with radio singles - and I think it’s a great song.
Oh, I know that. However, in zine days, it was a lot easier to filter out the bad stuff. Zines had editors, so there was quality control. On the other hand, we have fanfiction.net, with no quality control. And it was a nice place back in 2000 in the anime category, until the big boom caused by DBZ and Inuyasha being on TV came and brought younger, less grammatically sound writers along. The net has virtually no quality control - archives with editors generally have very few entries for a size of a fandom.
I’m sorry. I misunderstood. The problem is that today’s slash isn’t good enough.
To each her own. Not something I ever really understood . . .