Insomniak

Am I Doomworld's biggest lurker?


Seriously. My last reply wasn't that much. My most recent posts are always in the Blog section, and I am unable to remember when the last time I posted in a regular forum was, especially the regular Classic Doom forums.

Not that I've really had anything to say on the subject. When I do play Doom (which is very rarely now), it's on the Doomsday engine, which I use out of shear lack of decent OS X-compatable ports. Zdoom developers have been blatently slow and apathetic to covering this OS. It's a shame, because I used to really love using zdoom for multiplayer games on CSdoom, zdaemon, and skulltag in my Windows days. Doomsday is pretty much laughed out of that field, and Legacy is only good for one thing: the Nimrod wad. As I'm not a developer, Odamex is useless to me, and it's early alpha stages put me off it for now.

(I'm going to make a small not here about Fraggle's Chocolate Doom: While idealistic and cool, it does not permit the openGL effects and all around beauty I expect from a modern doom engine. Sorry)

So if I don't doom anymore, why do I still use DW as my main blog? Most of it has to do with the day Linguica or BS opened the Blogs forum, which provided me with a free blog page at the time to vent, but ultimatly cost me more trouble than it was worth.

And look, my total postcount is still under 820. Not counting the +1000 posts I originally made as Sleepy_Boy when I initially joined the forum in 2000, or the fact that Lut decided to award me -999 posts on the old forum software, and I painstakingly worked back those posts until my account mysteriously stopped working, and I re-registered as Insomniak. Blog posts don't add to the total.

But for some strange reason, I stay. I lurk. I vent on #zdoom even though I don't use the engine and hardly post on DW at all, much to the chagrin of the moderators, developers, and more affluent members. I'm not even too sure why: maybe it's out of some form of social acceptance that I used to get in this community. Maybe it's because x-chat is just a part of my old startup routine, and the channels I visit are set to autojoin.

I am really starting to question my whole purpose here.

And yet, I can't just up and leave. Six years on an internet forum and you develop what might be described as freindships, but that just sounds too creepy. It's people like BBGNaked Snake, Danarchy, Darknation, Quasar`, Isle, Bloodshedder, zarkyb, Ralphis and deathz0r, just to name a few off the top of my head, that keep me here. Most of you are interesting people with some of the same interests as me.


but I just don't get the same thrill I used to when I load up E1M1 and start shooting shit. The magic of the game is gone for me.

Would any of you really notice if I never came back?

Would my presence have made any difference in any of your lives?

Why should I keep playing Doom?