DT's Dungeon of Horrors!!! =O Oh and it's a blog too....(PG-13 for swearing)

[DarkToph]

The birthday curse has struck - I am tummy sick. Weather is poo. Slush and mud coat my outdoors. Will be forced to talk to sister if she calls. Mercy, curse. Mercy.

[Picard]

Get woll soon.

[DarkToph]

175 – Wobbu-palooza: Really weren’t trying with this episode’s title, were you 4Kids? I don’t think I’ve ever seen this episode, so let’s just dive in.

- Well, that didn’t take long. I DO remember this episode. It’s the creepy as fuck Wobbuffet fanboys/girls episode. I guess I blocked it out.

To get the low down – The main setting of this episode is Wobbuffet village: a place where everyone owns a Wobbuffet and loves the crap out of them. They all wear Wobbuffet t-shirts and sing the praises of Wobbuffets to all passersby. And of course the gang just happens upon this weird town during their Wobbuffet festival, where everyone celebrates Wobbuffet. Because they don’t do that enough during the rest of the year. There’s no real reason why everyone here loves Wobbuffet either. The first guy they meet just says ‘there’s just something about them. Just looking at a Wobbuffet makes you feel warm and happy.’

It’s kinda weird that they celebrate Wobbuffet but don’t seem to give a shit about Wynaut. Or was this before Wynaut existed? This is why building on old generations confuses me sometimes.

- Is anyone else in the slightest bit disturbed how easily a lot of people in the Pokemon world invite random travelers off the street into their homes without question? I mean, this woman sees these people (Team Rocket) have a Wobbuffet and just assume they’re there for the festival and instantly invites them to her house without even asking their names.

- Uh lady. Bat an eyelash at the talking Meowth? Why has this ceased to be a problem unless the script calls for it to be one for plot convenience?

- At the very least, it’s nice that the main characters are acknowledging that this place and these people are a bit weird. I mean, if you like something, good on ya, and if you’re a big fan of something, good on ya too, but this is just weird.

- I can easily see 15 more minutes of hearing Wobbuffet calls getting irritating fast.

- Why did Jessie’s Wobbuffet need a yellow bandanna to tell it apart from other Wobbuffet when none of the other Wobbuffet at the festival have anything like that? Yes, they’re distinguishable by minor features, but many of them don’t have special features other than size. They’re just as indistinguishable as Jessie’s Wobbuffet.

- I know it’s easy to connect the dots with three people attacking Wobbuffet around town back to Team Rocket, but please use logic, Ash and co. Team Rocket wants to steal Pokemon not beat them up for fun. If they succeeded in knocking out several Pokemon, even Wobbuffet, they’d take them afterward; not leave them for dead. Maybe Manga or Game Team Rocket would but not Anime Team Rocket and definitely not these three.

- Ya know, even if Team Rocket weren’t the ones beating up the Wobbuffet, they’re still fugitives, technically. With how many times they’ve attempted to steal Pokemon, destroyed property and stolen property, just seeing them is worth a call to Officer Useless—Jenny.

- Ooh goodie! A team of new antagonists. I’m sure they’ll have plenty of interesting backstories, personalities, motivations and dialogue!

- This week’s WtP is Sneasel and the hint is ‘This vicious Pokemon feeds on Pidgey’s eggs!’ That is indeed true, but uh, 4Kids, kinda aiming for the dark fact this week aren’t we?

- So the backstory of these guys is as follows;

They’re a trio of Fighting Pokemon trainers who, instead of battling fairly, decided to train their Pokemon by instructing them to destroy Wobbuffet Village. They targets Lulu’s (The woman who invited Team Rocket to her house) Wobbuffet next and with an incredibly annoying non-Wobbuffet-ish screech, it Mirror Coat’d them all into submission and they ran away with their tails between their legs.

Thug: “We never forget. That’s why we’re back.”

Thug 2: “You beat us once. Well, you won’t do it again. It’s payback time!”

Brock: “So that’s the reason they came back. To get revenge!”

Brock, for the love of all things stupid, please stop fucking repeating information that is conveyed to us a mere line prior. You do this so often that I almost believe your lines would be cut in half if they decided to stop this.

And hey look, Pyro from the Eevee brothers has gone down a bad path.



- So, because they got beat by one Wobbuffet, they decide they’re going to beat the hell out of every Wobbuffet in the town as revenge?….Without even thinking about just getting revenge on the Wobbuffet that beat them in the first place? *sigh* You know what? We’re getting a break from Team Rocket shenanigans, so whatever.

- Hehe, a Wobbuffet in a cop hat.

- So a cool three on three battle, complete with Misty and Brock not only participating, but Brock using Golbat on top of that, is stopped because all battling is prohibited during the Wobbuffet festival. *huff*

Wobbuffet are never the first to attack so, in that spirit, they never allow Pokemon battles at the festival.

A few things.

1) That’s not really the ‘spirit’ of Wobbuffet, that’s the limitation of Wobbuffet.

2) This would make more sense if Wobbuffet were a pacifist Pokemon who never battled, not a reactive Pokemon who battles when prompted.

3) These three jackholes are initiating a battle, thus in the true spirit of Wobbuffet, the battle should continue as a reaction to this attack.

Bonus: You really think these nameless thugs give a damn about your festival rule?

- Oh no, not the giant paper-mache Wobbuffet with the miscolored tail. Anything but that unimportant thing that would be easily destroyed in a gentle rain shower.

- Oh yeah, Jessie’s Wobbuffet looks real troubled with its same goofy grin on its face.

- Uh, Officer Jenny, I know Pokemon battling is against festival rules, but uh, you’re still a friggin’ cop. Why are you not even attempting to do something about the festival symbol getting slowly beaten to hell by these thugs? That coupled with the fact that her Pokemon is also a Wobbuffet, meaning she could never proactively attack a criminal, means Wobbuffet Village must be the easiest criminal target ever.

- Let me get this straight. Letting someone break festival tradition by battling, no matter what’s happening, is unacceptable. However, letting someone destroy the festival symbol is acceptable because it clashes with the festival rule. These people are idiots.

- And why exactly don’t they just tell them to move the battle outside of town?

- Any non-flying Pokemon doing Seismic Toss always looked incredibly stupid to me.

- So these three idiots have been training for a year to defeat tons of Wobbuffet, and they never once thought to catch a Pokemon or learn a strategy that would be good against Counter or Mirror Coat? You guys deserve your lack of names.

Being fair, they do have names. But they’re only in the Japanese version and they’re never stated in the episode or anywhere else. They’re on the closed captioning.

- Lulu threatened the thugs by standing in front of an army of Wobbuffet….oh no. You’d better run. They might do nothing because they’re reactive Pokemon.

- They just had to ruin any credit this episode had built didn’t they? The only real good moment of this whole episode was Team Rocket using their criminal nature to the good guys’ advantage, stating they didn’t care about the festival rule so they could battle the thugs and save the festival symbol. They could’ve just left it at Team Rocket wanting to be respectful of the people who helped them and their own Wobbuffet’s ‘family’ so to speak, and just had them leave at the end.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Team Rocket decides to steal the festival food from the storehouse anyway, feeling absolutely no remorse whatsoever, and Ash and Co. have to blast them off once they’re far enough away from the village for battling to be okay again.

I will say it’s implied that their heroism was genuine, even though they betrayed them at the end. See, they mock the villagers for falling for their ‘hero’ act so they could supposedly get the food. However, they would’ve gotten away with the food scot-free if they chose against acting like a hero since everyone was at town square distracted by the thugs. If anything, they just drew the entire town’s attention to their theft by making a spectacle of leaving then stealing the food right in front of their faces. However, Team Rocket’s stupid enough to believe that would be a better option, so make of that what you will.

- How’d they fix the festival symbol so quickly?

All in all, this episode had potential, and it could’ve been another look into a nicer Team Rocket. However, they ruin it with complete throw-away antagonists who are just nameless thugs with stupid motivations who pose no real threat, a stupid festival rule that is used as a plot device that has an easy and obvious loophole that Jenny only decides to mention once it’s more beneficial to the plot, and they ruin the Team Rocket plotline by making them betray Lulu and the villagers and showing no remorse about it.

I will say the Wobbuffet didn’t get as much on my nerves as I worried they’d get, but it was treading the line.

Next episode, Duplica’s back!….Yay? And so her schtick doesn’t get too old, she has a new Ditto in Mini-Dit, a tiny Ditto who can only transform into tiny versions of other Pokemon.

[Picard]

The guy on the right of the image look suspiciously like Oak.

[DarkToph]

Well, some people still believe that Oak is Ash's dad, we don't really know who Gary's Mom or Dad is to make Oak his grandpa, and he's never seen having any sort of romantic entanglement or marriage so it's probably safe to say he's a multi-woman baby daddy. He certainly didn't inherit his fashion sense, though.

[DarkToph]

175 – Imitation Confrontation: A rare non-pun title? Bless you, 4Kids.

I remember seeing this episode several times as it ran in syndication a lot. Though, I still can’t say I’m a big fan of Duplica. She’s more tolerable than Casey, and she can be kinda fun, but there’s just something about her that annoys me. Her mannerisms, the way she talks; it all just irks me a little. And it annoys me even more that one-trick ponies like her are made into recurring characters while the more interesting characters are constantly left as one-offs.

She’s such a one-trick pony that they specifically gave her a new Ditto with a different quirk just to redo her original plotline again. The only difference here is, of course, the quirk (retaining Ditto’s goofy face → Transforming into mini-versions of the Pokemon) and the fact that it’s not ‘fixed’ at the end like it was with her first Ditto. Instead she learns to love it as it is. And the fact that it has a super unique gimmick guaranteed to make her a ton of money on her shows is just gravy.

See, Duplica’s Original Ditto? If you just had an interesting quirk instead of an unholy abomination of a defect, you could’ve made Duplica proud without needing to change yourself too! Now you’re just a regular Ditto doing regular Ditto things and Mini-Dit has taken your spotlight because who wants to see a regular Ditto when you can see a Mini-Ditto?

-----------------------------

- Oh my God, tiny Onix is adorable.

- There’s something creepy about James dressing up as Ash….

And why do they have those outfits just lying around?

- Oh my God, tiny Dragonite is adorable.

- Team Rocket’s plan this week actually isn’t terrible (making Mini-Dit transform into a Pokemon, creating a miniature version, then trading off the mini-Pokemon for a rare one, stealing back Mini-Dit and then doing it over and over again to get as many rare Pokemon as possible) but why the hell would they be stupid enough to start implementing this plan so close to where they stole Mini-Dit?

‘We’ll never find Mini-Dit now!’

‘Hey, someone nearby is selling a miniature Arbok!’

‘That’s nice, but how does that help me find my Ditto that transforms into miniature versions of large Pokemon!?’

- Jessie just referred to Arbok as a Rock Pokemon. And they even acknowledge it by making a joke “Now in pebble size.”….For the love of God. It was bad enough when they did all those errors in the first movie, but we’re 176 episodes in, guys. You should at least be savvy enough with the main Pokemon to know that Arbok is a Poison type. What possible reason could anyone have for even believing for a second that Arbok’s a Rock type, anyway? It’s not gray or brown, it’s purple (the main Poison color), and it doesn’t look rocky or rough or anything.

- Why doesn’t Duplica just tell Mini-Dit to de-transform when she sees it as a mini Arbok? Or why doesn’t Mini-Dit turn back at the sight of her? It would do no harm to just say ‘If you’re Mini-Dit, de-transform’ and Mini-Dit should listen considering she’s its trainer, not Team Rocket.

But then again, she’s as stupid as Ash and the others. Jessie and James are only wearing different clothes and small sunglasses as disguises yet none of them recognize them. Duplica, you’re supposed to be a master of disguise. You of all people should be able to see through this sham.

- It’s weird how Duplica introduces Mirror Coat as the move that reflects special attacks and it’s some big revelation and reveal. Jessie has been Counter-ing both types of attack since she got Wobbuffet. And, hell, she’s been Counter-ing special attacks this very episode. Not to mention that Mirror Coat has been mentioned several times in the show already, both in Wobbuffet’s debut and in Wobbu-palooza.

- James: “I think I understand. That kid’s little Ditto wasn’t obeying Jessie’s orders, it was just doing what it took to protect itself.” What the hell does that have to do with the Mirror Coat revelation?

Duplica: “Mini-Dit knew I’d find it sooner or later. That’s why it decided to play along until I did. That’s what happens when a great trainer trains a great Pokemon.”

First, get your nose out of the air.

Second, again, what the hell does this have to do with the Mirror Coat thing? We shifted from the reveal of Mirror Coat and talking about that instantly to this talk of Mini-Dit pretending to go along with Team Rocket’s plans until Duplica came back for it.

Third, that’s smart….but remember when I asked why Mini-Dit didn’t automatically transform back when Duplica returned or why Duplica didn’t tell it to turn back to check if it was hers? That’s what happens when a stupid trainer trains a stupid Pokemon.

- I love Ursaring’s freaked out look when it sees a mini version of itself.

- Duplica: *About to battle Ash* “He’s gotten smarter, guys, so this might take a while.” Yeah, we’ll be on bated breath for those extra 17 seconds.

All in all, this episode was….meh. I didn’t care much to see Duplica again, even if this is her last appearance ever, Team Rocket’s plot was alright, but they executed it terribly (what a shock) there are numerous instances of annoying character stupidity and the only thing it has going for it is Mini-Dit, and that’s pure novelty. Oh and Mirror Coat gets brought up even though it’s been a recognized thing for ages, so now Counter has lost its all-encompassing reflection capabilities.

Hey, let’s follow a revisit to a somewhat annoying character of the day with a revisit to a seriously annoying character of the day and an annoying recurring comic relief Pokemon everyone forgot existed – Snubbull. At least this is its last appearance.

[DarkToph]

Who's ready for me to rant about more things that don't matter!?

So there's this show on Discovery channel called Naked and Afraid. It's a reality show where they take one man and one woman who fancy themselves as survivalists and put them in a remote exotic location, naked, mostly alone (followed by a small camera crew who only intervene when medical issues arise.) and with only one rustic tool each to help them along their journey. Their task is to survive for 21 days and then make a long trek to a pick up point where they will leave and go home. Part of the interest in this show isn't just how they'll find food, water and shelter, but also how the participants mesh with their partners. Sometimes, you'll get a really cool partnership that clicks from the get-go and you root for them all you can. Other times, you'll get two whiny assholes, and more often than not you'll get one good person being paired with an idiot who ruins everything for them.

There was one such pairing on an episode I caught earlier. The man was a burly survival instructor. The woman was a stay at home mom who fancied herself 'an American witch' Note, she didn't say anything about wiccan stuff, she just said she believes herself to be an American witch. Thus, she finds herself one with nature but dooesn't actually have formal survivalist training. Now, I actually don't mind the witch stuff. To each his own. But she did say something at the start that irked me the wrong way. She said she views men as the hunter gatherers and the women do the dishes.....Yeah....She'll pull her weight 'when she has to' but she basically states that she expects her partner, the man, to carry the bulk of the big strong tasks.....Lady, you are in the goddamn jungle. There are no dishes to wash. No laundry to do, especially considering you're naked. No little house to clean. Your whole challenge is big strong burly man stuff. Making shelter, hunting for food, foraging for food, finding water, making fire, etc.

I was notably pissed when she said this, but she did take the reigns on making the first shelter since she had the hatchet so I figured she was maybe just blowing smoke. They found a good source of water, a beautiful waterfall no less, definitely one of the best water sources they've ever found on the show, but have trouble finding food.

Finding food is a big strong man job, so since they stumbled upon the water and he has the firemaking skills, she does fuckall while he's left to find food. After a few days of starvation, he goes off to fish. And what does she do while he fishes? Walks around in the jungle bitching and moaning that he's wasting his time playing in the water when her husband would've been off in the woods stalking something to hunt. Lady, you have the damn weapon. If you think he's wasting his time doing what is basically hunting in water, go off into the woods and do your own hunting.

A few days later, he goes off to look for food again, having failed before, and she sits at camp. But don't worry. She's doing her part feeding the fire. Oh and by that I mean, she gets these huge logs and sets them on the fire to make a bonfire. Did I mention this fire is like ten feet from their shelter? When he finds it later he points out the obvious that the logs will take forever to light, if they catch at all, and the pieces are way too big and close to the shelter, so he decides to move them away. She's all 'pfft, we have bonfires all the time in Georgia. He doesn't know what he's talking about. But whatever.'

Lady, when you have bonfires in Georgia, do you typically build them just a few feet away from your house? No? Why is that? Take your time, it's a hard question.

He didn't have much luck hunting, but he did find a small dying bird on the ground that he decided to capture and bring back to eat.

Several more days go by, and the guy's off trying to find more food. What's Glenda the Dumb Witch doing? She's at camp wasting valuable resources and time by making a pentacle wreath out of twine and sticks to honor the spirit of the bird they ate.

Are you freakin' shitting me? It's good to respect the life of an animal who died to give you food, but putting up a decorative witch wreath to honor a bird? When you could be doing quite literally anything productive?

The guy is quickly getting worse and worse with lack of nutrition and their water source is also dwindling since they can only really drink the water coming from the sandstone since that's filtered. Also, a huge rainstorm restricts them from going out and finding more food. The guy eventually gets in such bad shape that he has to tap out and go home, leaving the woman by herself. She needs food. Gee, I wonder how she'll do that. Oh look, she's trying to fish in the same spot and same manner he was trying to do earlier. Well, golly, that's a huge waste of time. Why isn't she off crocheting a pillow for the shelter?

She has no luck there, but finds a parrot head then mocks the guy saying he'd probably correct her and say it's a parakeet....no, no, that's obviously a damn parrot, but good job on making fun of the only reason you made it longer than eleven minutes. She says the bird was probably killed and ripped apart by a vulture, and she decides to eat its brain for sustenance. Okay, kudos for finally trying to do something on your own..........but DON'T FUCKING DO THAT.

What makes you think that meat supposedly left behind by a vulture, animal brains no less, is good to eat? Do you even know how long that's been out there? Most survivalists will tell you to not eat something that you find dead because you can't be sure of the cause of death and the bacteria buildup over even a short amount of time can be extremely hazardous.

You'd think being a good little kitchen dwelling woman that she'd at least be adept at cooking. Eh no. First off, the bird the guy found before? He cleaned it and cooked it. She just ate it. Second, she doesn't even seem to get the head that close to the heat and when she eats it it's obviously not cooked much at all.

She returns to bringing big branches to the fire now that the only guy with sense is gone, and justifies it by saying the bigger ones are easier to carry since the smaller ones slip through her arms and make a mess. Yeah, burn down your camp and risk smothering the fire because you're a dumb klutz who can't carry small sticks....And **** they give you a damn bag (to carry a personal camera and capture night stuff and personal confessionals). Carry them in there if it's such an issue.

Predictably, the next day, which just happens to be day 21, she suffers from extreme abdominal pain and has to be rushed off to a local hospital by the show's medic. She contracted a non-life-threatening infection, probably from the parrot head. What a shocker.

What's even worse? At the start of each trip, the two participants are given a primitive survival rating based on their skills, mental and physical fortitude, knowledge and experience in survival. The guy obviously had a higher score than the woman at the start considering this is his job, and she was basically middle of the road. After the trek ends, they get reevaluated based on how they did. He got knocked off a couple of points because he quit mid-way through. She stayed until nearly the end and got over a point higher, making her rating higher than his at the end.

Go to hell, Naked and Afraid. He did all the work, every damn bit of it, and the only reason she survived much longer was because she was lazing about, doing arts and crafts and trying to make a house call to Smokey the Bear. He was exhausted and she was rested. He was physically spent, she was as relaxed as rich woman in a spa. He problem solved, she bitched and moaned. If she was alone from the start and tried to survive the way she did at the end, she would've tapped out on day 2. He was basically doing the challenge completely alone and gets marked off for not being able to carry his partner through the whole challenge while she coasts and bitches the whole time, acts like an idiot when left to her own devices and gets marked as being a better survivalist than him in the end? Bullshit.

[DarkToph]

Hey guys, I just wanted to touch base and get some things off my chest. This isn’t a rant or pointless ramble, and I hope to God it doesn’t come off as incessant whining – it’s moreso therapeutic writing. So if you want to ignore this, I completely understand.

For about a decade now, I’ve had pretty severe social anxiety disorder. It has been very crippling on my everyday life and I’ve basically been a hermit, only leaving the house when absolutely necessary, for several years now. I worked and went to school online and my minor social life is entirely online.

I can’t pinpoint when exactly this started, but down the line I also started getting increasingly depressed. I was pretty good at utilizing escapism, but the past few years it’s been getting harder and harder to get out of my head.

I’ve been to therapy before a few years ago, but stopped when my dog, Brandy, died. We had to put her down on the same day as one of my appointments so I had to postpone it and I just never rescheduled. I couldn’t bring myself to pick myself back up and do it. Also, I couldn’t really afford the co-pay anymore, and I felt paranoid that my parents were getting impatient and just expecting that I should ‘be better’ very quickly. They care a lot, but they never seem to understand these problems. I seriously doubt they even put any stock in mental illness, no matter how screwed up I act or what I’ve been formally diagnosed with.

None of this was helped when my mom got two black lab puppies two years ago. Yes, two puppies and yes, this part will be a tinge of rant. My mom works all day and my parents had recently bought some land that needed a ton of work, meaning my dad would be gone nearly all day every day too. I was left to grant round-the-clock care to these two puppies every day, even sleeping on the couch for about six months to ensure they’d be let out every two or three hours so they wouldn’t mess (even though they did anyway. Half the time I couldn’t get both out at the same time, so the other one would mess in the pen while the other one would be outside.) I was also tasked with their training, which went relatively fine when they were little and I could separate them, but when they got too big and I couldn’t separate them by myself anymore, their training waned.

I barely had a single moment to myself, any moment I had was dedicated to my schoolwork or trying to get some freelance writing done for some money, and did I mention I also have a batshit crazy elderly border collie to care for too? Don’t get me wrong, I love all of those little furry pains in my ass, but they also knocked me on my ass. Hard.

I was exhausted to my core, frustrated as hell, and I never felt more hopeless or defeated in my life. I was very much not in a good way in any form. I’ll spare you the ultra-dramatics, though.

Over the past year, maybe brought on by my impending and eventual graduation from school, I dunno, I have been getting very anxious all the time, even at home, (shaking sucks ass, btw) and my depression has gotten exponentially worse. I basically stopped talking to the handful of friends I had online, stopped playing games, severely slowed on my watching anime and reading manga, doing reviews, drawing, etc., which is why the review section’s been basically barren for most of the year. In the past few months, the anxiety’s gotten so bad I couldn’t take it anymore and broke down to my parents last week.

They didn’t say anything they haven’t already told me in the past after similar episodes or anything I didn’t already know, but this time was different because, instead of them pushing me over the edge into a….tantrum….anxiety attack….panic attack, whatever the hell those ‘things’ count as, I was the one who went to them and, while I didn’t keep my composure at all, I finally reached out for help on my own. It’s not much, but it’s something I did. It was something I was terrified to do for years. It sucked. Beyond sucked. It sucked so hard it blew. But I did it.

At the very least, I’ve been trying to go back to my therapeutic exercises and techniques that were given to me last time, and I got a Psych degree so that helps me understand some things on a deeper level….or at least it creates that feeling. I have to get some mileage out of it. (plus, my school’s online library is a big source of information on these issues and therapeutic techniques, so that’s good)

I’ve only been at it for a few days, but I have made some strides. I went to the doctor for a consultation on something I’ve been meaning to get looked at for years (it’s harmless, no worries.) I’ve made a couple of phone calls, I’ve reached out to a friend who was very cool about my lack of communication and reasons thereof for it, I’m trying to get on a better sleep schedule and actually get up and get ready for the day instead of doing it in the afternoon and I am actually making goals and trying to achieve them. I’ve had severe hiccups, but I’m getting by.

I just hope I can keep up the momentum because I honestly don’t think I have it in me to make it through another crash.

Now, brace yourselves, because I’m going to get sappy. No, I’m not drunk. And I’m not good with sharing non-anger feels, so here goes.

I know this place is really dead. I know there’s hardly anyone besides me and DB who come here and even fewer who actually post. I know I’ve never met any of you face to face, in fact I don’t think I ever posted a picture of myself before. But who cares? Physical proximity is not a prerequisite to friendship. I know most of the people I’m thinking of when I write this aren’t ever going to read it, but I want to say it anyway.

All of the people I’ve met, talked to and befriended on Aisenfield, and even way back into the days of Pokemon Crater, you all mean more to me than you’ll ever know. Yes, we’ve had some major disasters, words that should not have been said, things that should not have been done, and friends who have been lost to us because of it, but I actually completely forgot about every mess that has happened here when I was preparing on writing this part. All I remembered were the fun times, the jokes, the randomness, the caring, the creativity, the helping each other out and the shoulders to cry on. I would probably be much worse off today if I hadn’t clicked the link to the forums on Crater and joined in on the party. I know I’m a little weird, kooky, geeky and sometimes even creepy, I type too much and I harp on things that don’t even matter, but you made me feel at home. You guys kept me sane and I thank you all for that.

I miss you guys, too, but I realize people move on, especially from online communities. I can only hope you guys have had great lives so far outside of this place and maybe you’ll pop back in out of the blue to say ‘hi’. I’m probably always going to stick around here, at least as long as SMF keeps their servers up. This place means something to me that I can’t quite explain, and I don’t want to let it go. I’m going to drag it along with me, kicking and screaming.

That’s all I wanted to say. Back to your regularly scheduled nonsense.

[Picard]

Hey DT, I'm no good at speeches and all, but I want you to know that I'm here for you, at least. I got real busy with some projects at work, so I wasn't able to come here for the past two weeks. I'm gonna stick around here too, and beyond that, I should probably get you to download QQ messenger or something so we can have an IM group chat if SMF ever dies. It makes me sad that Aisenfield is pretty much dead, too, but there's not much that can be done but to preserve the memories that we've had here.

[Doru]

I love you all and miss you a lot. I find myself thinking of something that reminds me of the forum every couple of days. I found you guys when I started moving around a lot and Aisen (& Crater) was always there for me to come to. I wish the forum was more active and not just the forum games and someone's occasional blog post being all that really happens. I hope you get better DT.

[DarkToph]

Thanks a lot, guys. You're the best humanoid beings a gal could ask for.

I'll look into getting the messenger so we can stay in touch. My only other currently used method of chatting is Steam. My name there is Tsuzuko if you want to hit me up there. Just for the sake of it, maybe some way of backing up/archiving this place just in case SMF craps out. Then we can at least have the memories. Like a photo album with randomness and text.

[Doru]

What's QQ Messenger? Ever think about making a discord? Never used it myself but I always hear it mentioned in other communities for chatting with each other.

How would that work DT? Just take a snapshot of a bunch of threads?

[Picard]

Yeah, Discord is good, too. I have Discord. We can start a channel and everything. I've been using it for the past few months for other games and such, and it's really good.

[Doru]

Okay, cool. What info would we need to get in? All I know is it's an app you download to your phone/pc for chatting with other people.

[Picard]

Well, first you need to download Discord. Then you follow this link that I created:
https://discord.gg/Q3RcD7A