Pokemon Diamond

I stopped playing months back shortly after I'd gotten to the various areas, spending my occasional moments with the gameboy hatching eggs. I've started up again, and my pokedex has jumped from just over two hundred to nearly three hundred in a few days thanks to looking up a list of what pokemon appear where, then making my way through them.

It's okay, but there's niggling dissatisfaction.

The dual-slot/dongle thing, I thought, was okay - yeah, penalizing people for not having all the games, but you know Pokemon does that from the start. Not having the dongles work until after the main quest is over...less of a good idea. The same for the pokeradar. Getting to new areas and finding new pokemon is fun. Going back to old areas and checking them one by one to see if a new pokemon has shown up isn't. In the first gen, you got new pokemon in new areas. In the second gen, you got new pokemon in new areas. There were the legendary dogs, but you unlocked that halfway through the game, not after you were done, and swarms, which at least happened during the main game and where the game told you about them. In the first half of third-gen, there's a new pokemon appearing after you've finished everything, in the second half there's new pokemon appearing in general after you hit some arbitrary point...

It doesn't help that the existing pokemon pool is so anemic. As people pointed out early on, there's all of one fire type aside from the starter. Two fire types can be gotten at early routes dongles, which could really help if they were actually accessible.

That the trading system has been half broken since the third generation doesn't help, either. Not wanting to shell out money for another gameboy, I used Pokemon Colosseum if I needed to transfer pokemon, which means I can't trade with a new game, my old way of getting a variety of teams to play through the game with. In the fourth gen, you have to finish playing before you can trade anything from the earlier games, and I've yet to figure out a usable way to trade between games without a second DS.

Which is why I'm downloading a copy of Pearl right now with a DS emulator, followed by an action replay rom, to see if that works.

Fanlib: Not with a bang but a lot of whimpering

So Fanlib's announced they're shutting the doors and, being Fanlib, there's no further explanation and the moderators write explanatory posts explaining that this is news to them too.

This means all the fanlibbers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, or graduating high schoolers (same thing), about how they've going to lose all the friends they've made. Fanlib has CREEPY community senses. After the contest was over and I stopped posting, I got a PM from someone apologizing over what was actually the most minor fight I got into on the forum and asking if that was why I'd left because they hadn't seen me on for some time. When I went there this morning the threads on the forum were about half and half OMG WHY??? and threads trying to compile where everyone's going. Now the forums are entirely made up of redundant threads on where everyone's going and I'm getting PMs from people telling me this stuff because we're all friends!!! (We're not all friends) They're talking about how they don't want to lose touch with people, how their community is breaking up, making forums to gather on so they can keep together, etc. Over on FFN they've made both a forum and a C2 to gather all the stories written by members.

I'd normally go "Hey, free advertising!" but I really don't want anything I write to be tarred with that brush if I can avoid it. (Some of the people say they're not going to FFN because it's too confusing. So I want everyone to stop a moment and think about this: When we talk about FFN being full of the absolute dregs of writers, we're talking about a site that has filtered these people out.)

Anyway, this wouldn't be so creepy if it were a matter of collecting information from those you wanted to stay in touch with. But it's the same crazy thing that kicks in when people make any transition, where they make a big deal over "all you guys in the community", even if they don't technically know most of them. (Or, in my case, when we hate each other. DAMMIT I WORKED FOR THAT ANIMOSITY STOP WITH THE ROSE COLORED GLASSES ALL IS NOT FORGIVEN.) For that matter, the lion's share of it isn't collecting other people's information, it's passing their own around. It's probably partly that for a lot of people this was their first major community interaction and fanfic site so they're overreacting, but even still...seeing how glowingly they talk about their close community just makes confirms my desire to put as much distance between us as possible.

(On a more general note I think that, between this and metafandom, anywhere people think fanfic=community is a place that should be avoided if you want fanfic, rather than community. People who write fanfic to participate in a community are writing crappy fanfic with crappy attitudes on criticism or improving.)