DO YALL STILL PLAY TEAMFORTRESS2.ADD ME ON STEAM (GENTLEMANSKELETON)

Seconding the enthusiasm for the name POS Friends. It's catchy.

i like calliope more and more with every update but she's gonna die :(

One thing about POS that I've always sort of hypocritically lamented while contributing to the problem myself is the reluctance of everyone to share personal, factual information about themselves. To a degree this can be liberating, because anonymity allows one to attempt daring feats of humor that they may otherwise have been too timid to try, and escape the limitations and fears of their daily lives. There is also a tendency for people to believe that the details of their lives are too mundane, boring, shameful, inappropriate, or offensive to be shared in a large group setting; a tendency reinforced by the actual incidence of bullying, shaming, and fighting which has occurred here. I wonder if this catalyzed POS' decline. Although I feel the same fondness for you guys as that which you have shown me, I know almost nothing about you guys and I have fortuitously rebuffed everyone's attempts at prying into details of my own personal life, with the notable exception that I have partially addressed previously and will return to later in this post.

Do you guys think we could, if not permanently rejuvenate our friendships, at least do ourselves and our memories the favor of getting to know each other before parting ways? I sure have wondered about you guys and your histories sometimes, but I've never really given myself the opportunity to inquire about it. We all have families, friends, a hidden host of stories and anecdotes, daily lives and schedules, job histories and educations, interests, beliefs, passions, fears, desires, personal failings, talents, and ambitions. From those who I have been closest to during my stay here at POS, I have gotten fragmented glimpses into their personal lives and know a fairly good deal about them. Soap, Tenda, Krem, Ben, and Rick I known the most about, although still always an inadequate amount. I shared moments of bonding at some point or another with many other members of this site and know, if not a full picture, at least some sensitive, humanizing details about them.

Would we have the gumption to be honest with ourselves and each other and share our lives with each other here? It's not the kind of thing that we could force. Everyone would have to be comfortable sharing their story, knowing that they were not going to be ridiculed, judged, or shamed for their honesty and frankness. We'd have to keep the flippant humor to a manageable minimum. And we'd have to commit to it, not only committing ourselves to contribute to the discussion, but committing ourselves to read, ponder, and discuss each other's posts and learn from them. All hypothetically, of course, dependent on our actual desire to know each other as people in a manner surpassing that of the casual forum acquaintance.

And again hypothetically, this wouldn't have to be a cementing bond or grandiose friendship-revival project. Even if we learn about the details of each other's lives, there are still problems like divergent interests and diminishing leisure time that will put the strain on our friendships. I just think that it would be good to know the people who we formed this community together with, their personal histories, their present situations, and their future prospects.

I do appreciate some of the optimism in this thread, too. It's not as if our separation is total, or totally inevitable. There are still fun things that we can do together, and things that we all appreciate together, such as our trademark sense of humor. My problem is that I don't like getting my hopes up for any sort of large-scale revival when I've been disappointed repeatedly in the past, and I feel that others here may share those reservations. I'm comfortable in the notion that I will always remain friends with the POS population, in the sense that I will always remember them fondly, be able to pick up a conversation with them when I encounter them as if we were only talking yesterday, and be there for them if they ever needed my support or sympathetic ear. But I am pessimistic about the idea that we can ever be what we once were.

I sort of feel like I've carried the irony thing about as far as I can. Not that I won't still appreciate the humor, or remember our crazier ironic performances kindly. It's just, I'm so tired of using it as a primary vehicle for communication, and of course it's alienating to the people who have to read it.

It's been really nice getting the chance to read you guys' unvarnished thoughts on this site and what it meant to you. It's made me realize that there are a lot of people who got sidelined unfairly on this forum, whose contributions were every bit as worthy as any other POSer's.

Oh, looks like Soap's replied while I was typing this. I'm not against the idea of starting with a clean slate as long as our history is archived properly and not simply tossed away... I'm certain that we won't be having any new guests at our forum anytime soon, and I'm at peace with that fact. It'd be nice to not have to post with all the weight of yesteryear pressing down on us.

Why are things always falling apart?

This is something I constantly think about. When we're growing up, we make our childhood friends, always promising to stay friends forever. But we become different. We grow. We go our separate ways. We change schools. We move out. We move on. The only way to keep a friendship, it seems, is to love someone from afar and appreciate the dwindling few moments you get to spend with each other. Don't try and push it and stay friends all the time. You'll run out of things to talk about. You'll run into disagreements and face the stark realization that you are too different to get along anymore. What a bitter disappointment growing up presents! I've left so many wonderful friendships behind, and now I'll never see that person again, and we'll never be the people we were when we were friends.

We've been dealing with this troublesome fact for years at POS. Even when we were all still talking, the fault lines and cracks were making themselves manifest in the strangest of ways. We started breaking off into subgroups based on common interests, remember? There was a "regular" POS and then there was a Wonder Garden. Then the Wonder Garden people became even too different from each other to keep talking, and there were fights and bitterness, and eventually there wasn't much at regular POS besides Doom, imagefests, and movies. Over the course of years, people who were such close friends, people who stayed up late nights talking, joking, sharing fears, fights, and fantasies, were helpless to stop the process of slow atomization, the gradual inexorable drifting apart that growing up forced on us all.

Now look at us. We can barely speak to each other anymore. All the joy's been sucked out of our conversations. We have hardly a thing in common.

Why are things always falling apart?

It wasn't even our fault. There was no lack of trying on our part, to mend the friendships and keep this wonderful thing we built together. It was as though we were pulled apart by entropy. This happens to me in all of my IRL friendships, eventually. I think some of you guys know what I am talking about here. There are friends who you want to reconnect with. But every time you try, you're stuck thinking the same miserable thought: "Well, it just wasn't the same somehow."

I won't deny that I feel guilty sometimes. This process of long-term separation wasn't completely out of our control, I think. If we hadn't fought so much... if we'd just paid more attention to each other's interests... if we'd tried harder to stay in contact... if we hadn't alienated each other... we'd have some remnant of the friendship to show for it... maybe...

I was always trying to bridge these divides. I'm not saying I was great at it, but I was aware of the fault lines and very, very anxious about them! I tried out so many different things, to make it work. Even when I was in my shitty club for shitty avant garde music, I tried Darkstalkers, and I tried Doom, and I tried Stone Temple Pilots, and I tried listening to people's music in the PotWs. I kept thinking, maybe if I could share everybody's interests, I could get them to like each other again, and stop fighting. But then I just went back and perpetuated the same argumentative, dramatic bullshit, the same old "hilarious" trolling, and did basically nothing of any value for anybody.

Of course it's normal for this stuff to happen, even to the best of friends. But why is that the norm? Why do we have to accept that all of our friendships are doomed from the start? It'd be nice if there we an exception to that rule. It seemed like we were that exception. But again... just look at us now. All our conversations, disjointed and awkward, our interactions the bare minimum required to demonstrate that we at least still remember each other.

While I'm unpacking all this baggage, I might as well dump this on the table too. I think I am probably responsible more than anyone else for making this environment awkward, uncomfortable, and not conducive to a healthy, thriving friendship. When I started identifying as Wendy on the forums, I felt so excited, so certain that I had at last found out who I really was. It was just experimentation at first, but I became so emotionally reliant on it as an outlet for all these unresolved inner tensions and feelings...

But that was selfish, I think. I had, and have, no idea who I am or what I want out of life, and I grow more confused on that subject every day. My decision to use this forum as a place to experiment with my identity put everyone in an awkward situation, which I think you all handled pretty well and I handled terribly. I forced people to go along with my own whims, and shamed them for not doing so. But what did I know about anything? What right did I have to suddenly force everyone to change how they viewed me in a day? What right did I have to alienate my friends because of some private confusions with my gender identity?

I know that, right now at least, I'm not on the course for that vaunted sex change that I long/longed for. I'm in a committed, long-term relationship. I want to marry this girl. I know she's not interested in dating or marrying a real woman, let alone some fake-trans ersatz internet freak in drag with an ugly, mannish face and an inferiority complex. I still think all the time about the emotions that drove me to adopt the identity I'm using now, and I still feel like I'm strangling an important part of myself by choosing this path... but I don't know what taking the risky path of gender transition even means. What is a man? What is a woman? What is the significant difference that would make me comfortable or uncomfortable being one or the other? Why is my supposed dissatisfaction with my gender expressed through the stupidest and most frivolous ways: clothes, patterns of speech and body language, names, makeup, hairstyles, forum avatars, online identities? I have no idea who the hell I am or what I'm doing. What does it mean that I changed my name to Wendy? Who is Wendy, or Wally, or Robert, or Bon Clay, or Withershins, or whoever the fuck for that matter? I don't know the answers to these questions and I have immense emotional baggage because of that and I just dumped all that baggage onto these forums and left it for you guys to clean up.

When I first came here, I felt all alone. Was it just me? Weren't we all really lonely people when we came here? This place was my oasis, you guys were my respite from everything I hated about my daily life and the city I lived in. Maybe we're not so lonely as we used to be. We aren't pubescent kids anymore. We don't live with the awkwardness, the shyness, the bullying, the isolation. We know "how to act" in public. But I miss it. God, I miss it. Coming here, logging into #melee, and staying up all night with my favorite friends.

And being able to talk about just anything. None of this awkwardness where we can't talk because one of us doesn't know the thing the other likes and wants to talk about. That sure wasn't a problem for us back in the day, was it? When did simply having a discussion become the verbal equivalent of a Herculean labor?

I guess I'm responsible for this to some degree, too. Irony is an awful mode of humor in a lot of ways, because there's simply no bottom. If your jokes aren't funny enough, just add another layer of irony and it's fresh and good at new! It's like trying to paint over rust: the unoriginality will always show through at the end. And so, using that mode of humor way beyond its natural limits, I alienated friends and divided the group yet again further.

Oh, how I miss the things I'll never be able to have again. Nothing will ever replace POS. I'll always search in vain for something to fill the void that these bygone friendships have left in my heart. All I can really do is offer apologies on apologies for my contribution to the confluence of events that drove us apart, and say I'll always love you and wish you the best in each of your individual life journeys.

I wish I had some kind of conclusion set up to this, but this is a problem that'll never get resolved, and I don't have any kind of happy note to leave it on. Things fall apart as time goes by. Our friendship was here yesterday, and it's gone today, leaving behind only fond memories, warm nostalgia and hard regrets.

There's just no way I can keep coming to this forum without saying all this, though. We cannot have a friendship of so many years that runs so deep that just fucking dies without anything being said about it. We should at least acknowledge how much we meant to each other, and how much we loved each other even if we never really said it enough. I guess this is why I have posted this meandering, melancholy ramble, which I have, unfortunately for my readers, not decided to edit, trim, or even look at before hitting the Post button.

(sexy and i know it parody lmfao)

So call me, maybe.

However, widespread use of morphine and opium-based medicines such as codeine soon produced a serious drugaddiction problem. In 1821 the English writer Thomas De Quincey first drew attention to the problem of post-treatment addiction when he published an essay entitled, Confessions of an English OpiumEater. De Quincey hadbecome addicted during his student days at Oxford University, and remained an addict for the rest of his life. Finallyrecognizing the seriousness of the addiction problem, medical science devoted considerable pharmacological researchto finding a nonaddicting pain killer-a search that eventually led to the discovery and popularization of heroin. In 1874an English researcher, C. R. Wright, synthesized heroin, or diacetylmorphine, for the first time when he boiledmorphine and acetic anhydride over a stove for several hours. After biological testing on dogs showed thatdiacetylmorphine induced "great prostration, fear, sleepiness speedily following the administration and a slighttendency to vomiting," the English researcher wisely decided to discontinue his experiments. (8) Less than twentyyears later, however, German scientists who tested diacetylmorphine concluded that it was an excellent treatment forsuch respiratory ailments as bronchitis, chronic coughing, asthma, and tuberculosis. Most importantly, these scientistsclaimed that diacetylmorphine was the ideal nonaddicting substitute for morphine and codeine. Encouraged by theseresults, the Bayer chemical cartel of Elberfeld, Germany, decided to manufacture diacetylmorphine and dreamed up thebrand name "heroin" for its massmarketing campaign. Bayer wanted all the world to know about its new pain reliever,and in 1898 it launched an aggressive international advertising campaign in a dozen different languages.(9)

Scholars believe that man first discovered the opium poppy growing wild in mountains bordering the easternMediterranean sometime in the Neolithic Age. Ancient medical chronicles show that raw opium was . highly regardedby early physicians hundreds of years before the coming of Christ. It was known to Hippocrates in Greece and inRoman times to the great physician Galen. From its original home in the eastern Mediterranean region, opium spreadwestward through Europe in the Neolithic Age and eastward toward India and China in the early centuries of the firstmillennium after Christ. Down through the ages, opium continued to merit the admiration of physicians and gained inpopularity; in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, for example, opium-based medicines were among the mostpopular drugstore remedies for such ordinary ailments as headaches and the common cold.
Although physicians had used various forms of opium for three or four thousand years, it was not until 1805 thatmedical science finally extracted pure morphine from raw opium. Orally taken, morphine soon became an importantmedical anesthetic, but it was not until 1858 that two American doctors first experimented with the use of thehypodermic needle to inject morphine directly into the bloodstream. (7) These discoveries were important medicalbreakthroughs, and they greatly improved the quality of medical treatment in the nineteenth century.

Heroin, a relatively recent arrival on the drug scene, was regarded, like morphine before it, and opium beforemorphine, as a "miracle drug" that had the ability to "kill all pain and anger and bring relief to every sorrow." A singledose sends the average user into a deep, euphoric reverie. Repeated use, however, creates an intense physical cravingin the human body chemistry and changes the average person into a slavish addict whose entire existence revolvesaround his daily dosage. Sudden withdrawal can produce vomiting, violent convulsions, or fatal respiratory failure. Anoverdose cripples the body's central nervous system, plunges the victim into a, deep coma, and usually produces deathwithin a matter of minutes. Heroin addiction destroys man's normal social instincts, including sexual desire, and turnsthe addict into a lone predator who willingly resorts to any crime-burglary, armed robbery, armed assault, prostitution,or shoplifting-for money to maintain his habit. The average addict spends $8,000 a year on heroin, and experts believethat New York State's addicts alone steal at least half a billion dollars annually to maintain their habits. (6)
Heroin is a chemically bonded synthesis of acetic anhydride, a common industrial acid, and morphine, a naturalorganic pain killer extracted from the opium poppy. Morphine is the key ingredient. Its unique pharmaceuticalproperties are what make heroin so potent a pain killer and such a dangerously addicting narcotic. The acidic bondsimply fortifies the morphine, making it at least ten times more powerful than ordinary medical morphine andstrengthening its addictive characteristics. Although almost every hospital in the world uses some form of morphine asa post-operative pain killer, modern medicine knows little more about its mysterious soothing properties than did theancients who discovered opium.

AMERICA is in the grip of a devastating heroin epidemic which leaves no city or suburb untouched, and which also runs rampant through everyAmerican military installation both here and abroad. And the plague is spreading-into factories and offices (among the middle-aged, middle-classworkers as well as the young), into high schools and now grammar schools. In 1965 federal narcotics officials were convinced that they had theproblem under control; there were only 57,000 known addicts in the entire country, and most of these were comfortably out of sight, out of mind inblack urban ghettos.(1)* Only three or four years later heroin addiction began spreading into white communities, and by late 1969 the estimatednumber of addicts jumped to 315,000. By late 1971 the estimated total had almost doubled-reaching an all-time high of 560,000.(2) One medicalresearcher discovered that 6.5 percent of all the blue-collar factory workers he tested were heroin addicts,(3) and army medical doctors wereconvinced that 10 to 15 percent of the GIs in Vietnam were heroin users.(4) In sharp contrast to earlier generations of heroin users, many of thesenewer addicts were young and relatively affluent.
The sudden rise in the addict population has spawned a crime wave that has turned America's inner cities into concrete jungles. Addicts are forcedto steal in order to maintain their habits, and they now account for more than 75 percent of America's urban crime.(5) After opinion polls began toshow massive public concern over the heroin problem, President Nixon declared a "war on drugs" in a June 1971 statement to Congress. He urgedpassage of a $370 million emergency appropriation to fight the heroin menace. However, despite politically motivated claims of success insucceeding months by administration spokesmen, heroin continues to flood into the country in unprecedented quantities, and there is everyindication that the number of hard-core addicts is increasing daily.

Every morning i listen to confesssionals.

Let me just add this: Homestuck gets updated every day, but it's really meant to be read as a serial, like an already-completed comic. If you're frustrated with waiting a day for more confusing revelations that won't be fully contextualized until later, try reading through the comic from Page One again. You'll get an appreciation for how the comic is meant to be paced, the "payoff" will come as quickly as you can click through to it, and you'll notice countless wonderful little details you never saw before. OK. THATS MY PIECE. MY ONE PIECE. PEACE OUT YALL.

Avitar is a cartoon about kids with feelings. They can do magic powers like fly or shoot water balls. I like it

I still like Homestuck. I have all sorts of reasons why! I think that Hussie has been pulling out all of the narrative, thematic, and artistic stops recently, I love all of the new characters, I really feel like Act 6 is the payoff for all of the buildup of previous chapters. Lots of people who were big fans before seem to have gotten dissatisfied with it, though. I would offer a defense of my favorite comic here, but it would be pointless. Enjoyment is a thing you feel, not a conclusion you arrive at after logical debate or whatever.

I guess maybe it has something to do with how complicated it's gotten? I understand that criticism, but I don't think Homestuck is any more complicated than your typical shonen anime, Naoki Urasawa manga, video game series canon or superhero canon, and I think the complication is justified given the complex themes that the story explores.

In any case, it's just a comic. Like it or don't, it's no big deal.

clopping itt

Wise from yuor gwave

I just downloaded all of Legend of Korra. But I still have about half of book 3 to get through. And a rewatch to do so I can catch up certain select special compadres on the show!!

None! Because... jeez! Can you imagine a woodchuck having the physical strength to even lift an Xbox, let alone muster the propulsive force necessary to chuck it? Please try to think for yourself and use a modicum of common sense before posting these cockamamie hypotheticals.

spat you are really something else you know that?