The Round Stable

it will remain on 1

that's what she said

i love a picture with nice scenery

These Mickey Mouse cartoons are getting more abstract.

the ending is utter nonsense, perfect

There was one short that ended with Goofy voreing Mickey and Minnie while they're having a romantic dinner.

That literally happened in a Disney cartoon

Yup

Mickey Mouse, now written by DeviantArt users.

You know what's agony for me?
You have a headache and be tired for 3 weeks, it was unbearingly hot, aching eyes, and have half of a short box of comics (about 40 comics) to read but can't (because all of the things).

chip's lp is making me want to replay mgs v

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 07, 2019 7:59 pm

it will remain on 1

FUCK

I AM A FAILURE

YOU FOOL! NEXT IT'LL BE THREE POSTS!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 09, 2019 6:10 am

I AM A FRIEND SUPPORTING SOMEONE IN THAT PERSON'S TIME OF NEED

Fixed.

wow

it is truth

WOW

just think of it as progress towards another dumbass number, like 69, or 420, or something

it would be nice to hit those

like a dollar menu burger. :flirt:

Free :flirt: from Kefka's tyranny.

so from what i understand the show is ending

now i don't know what's gonna happen to this place when that happens, but like if y'all decide to pull the plug

it was wild ride

The end will likely be at some point in October. After that there might be one last movie of some sort, then according to rumors Hasbro will start G5 in 2021 or so. I imagine this forum and the booru will stay online as long as people continue to post, continue to support it, and continue to care.

Who knows what the future holds? Maybe G5 will be a smash hit. Maybe lightning will strike twice. In that case, we will be ready for a new generation.

like most of us don't even watch pony anymore rofl we're just here because find somewhere else on the internet where you don't get some random asshole what abouting re. trans rights

Orange Fluffy Sheep wrote: ↑

Fri Jul 12, 2019 7:11 pm

like most of us don't even watch pony anymore rofl

I do.

I wonder what g5 will look like, literally and figuratively, relative to g4

It's going to be live-action with real horses I hope.

I'm sticking around to keep your bird quota up

also I've been thinking a lot in general about the meaning that people assign (or don't) to communities and identities and how that affects retention

i was reading a passage recently that might as well have been subtweeting my experience with the furry fandom and it applies pretty well to boards like this one as well, the book is in my car right now but I'll try and grab it and quote later on

OK I found the thing

a Franciscan friar, writing about spiritual communities and somehow managing to indirectly call out furries and bronies in the process, wrote: Around the beginning of the 1970s I was very busy with the "community of communities" (a network of American base communities). Whenever I talk about this with Jim Wallis, one of the founder/pastors of the Sojourners community and magazine, we both find it very painful, and we wonder why so many communities started up and then folded.

The most plausible answer I've found so far is that they tortured themselves to death. But I also think they had a hard time integrating spirituality and commitment to social justice issues. Some of them developed too much into "therapeutic communities" and imploded. After two or three years many members asked themselves, "What am I still doing here?" Many of the once politically oriented communities attracted a crowd of idealists, and then wore each other out with their idealism. Often they were more in love with their own ideals than with reality. If people haven't gone on a serious spiritual journey it's easy to predict that they'll be more in love with the idea of community than with the real thing.

I keep saying to new groups that it's very important to be extremely honest from the beginning about the real expectations and presuppositions that you bring with you. Of course it takes a long time to discover what these are, especially because so many of these communities have been founded by young people. In a culture like ours, where people grow up very slowly, the communities undeniably turned into places where you worked out your identity problems.

The same thing, of course, is true today about the preparation for religious life. The novice masters of religious orders have to grapple with an immense fluctuation in numbers. It's very hard to hold on to twenty-year-olds who are just then becoming adults. It's also difficult because young people simply use these communities to grow up. But if we take the capitalistic nature of our culture into consideration, this can scarcely surprise us. Nowadays most things are looked on simply as means of enriching one's own ego. Thus community too can easily become one consumer item alongside others; and once consumed, naturally it can be left behind.

(Richard Rohr, Simplicity 35-36, emphasis added)

Obviously the specifically spiritual/religious aspects of Rohr's concern, here, have to be translated into whatever it is that you think people come looking for in a community like TRS, or whatever furry balloon popping discord you're a part of (though I would argue that "spirituality", in the sense of philosophical like minds and ideals, isn't that far off from what some people were looking for when they came here). But I think he hits at one of the primary "problems" here: people shop around looking for a sense of community but are easily able to discard that community when the novelty has worn off, which makes one ask how thorough-going the aspiration to community was in the first place. "Problems" is in scare quotes because it's not really a problem for an individual person, especially someone going through late adolescence or early adulthood, to be trying different things on to see what fits; cf. the sexual or gender experimentation that can take place before one settles into a somewhat firm identity. But when everybody (or at least the vast majority of people) who try to come to a community ultimately ends up proving so facile in their engagement, the end result is going to be that the community "folds" or "implodes"—if not in literal completeness, then at least relative to its heyday. And I think that's what we see here.

(Oh, and that whole part about being more in love with the ideals of a community than its reality? Yeah, for now I'm just going to leave that as an exercise for the reader as to how it relates to TRS. But suffice to say I'm sure that all of us who have been around can see how this, too, could be used as a pointed critique of TRS/brony and furry social cliques in general.)

On the other hand, you have someone like me who hasn't always been the most central pillar of the community and has often been one of the people who was, if not standing outside the tent and pissing in, then at least doing so from the threshold. But for one reason or another, I've always ended up being drawn back here. Does this make me a better human being than someone who just doesn't care about any of you anymore? Probably not, but there's something qualitatively different there, however you want to put it. I'm still here, at least to some extent. So are you, if you're reading this. And they're not.

In conclusion,

that's genuinely a very neat quote and thought process and I'm glad you shared it with us

as for my own feelings on it I'll do a thinkgin about that

I wonder if that's why I'm so slow to join any sort of community and so dedicated once I do. I feel that if I take part in something then I have to give back somehow, so when it comes to online communities it means being a major participant and often ending up in a leadership role of one kind or another. Part of me evaluating a community is whether the people there are decent, but I've come to realize that for me the other part is evaluating whether I'd be able to contribute and make it a good and worthwhile place.

I hesitate to blame the cultural effects of capitalism in this case. I've learned that people change a lot as they grow up, particularly between the ages of 18 and 25, so what's right for them at one point in their lives may rapidly become insufficient or unnecessary in just a few short years. That does not strike me as being wrong, but I wonder now if my own lack of concern in this regard is due to having grown up in a capitalist society.

"Capitalism" might be a misleading bit of metonymy in this case--it sounds like what Rohr's referring to is not necessarily related to capitalism in the sense of exchanging money for goods, but more the general mindset that leads us to look at most things as cheap and therefore disposable.

I noted in my own commentary that I don't think all experimentation is necessarily bad or cheapening; quite the contrary, I tend to get upset when people argue (as they do) that folks who "experiment" with e.g. queer or trans identities, but end up deciding not to go with them, are somehow cheapening or invalidating the "real" queer or trans folk. But I think that as with most things, there's a right and a wrong way to go about experimenting. If you're (general you here, ofc) doing something because it legitimately calls to you at a certain point, if you're sincere in that, then I certainly don't think you've done anything wrong if you continue to go along through life and find yourself changing (as people do!) and it's no longer quite your thing anymore.



On the other hand, there sometimes seem to be legitimate grounds for looking over someone's behavior and concluding that their commitment was never very deep. In particular, it's annoying to see something that you treat as a legitimate part of your identity (whether it's gender or sexuality or a particularly passionate hobby, whatever) being treated as a meme or a fad by other people. The folks who spammed pony memes and art and then had wandered off to something else by season 3 or so are in this category.

FWIW, Fizzbuzz, I think your approach is a good one. If anything, I think you might be a bit too fretful and hesitant. One doesn't need to "contribute" a particular amount or a particular quality to a community, necessarily. If anything, that sort of accountancy might lead down the path of being concerned with the ideal of a community rather than its reality.

Bigdog puts it very well and the only thing I'd like to add is that contributing to a community isn't nearly as strict as you might think; being around in the capacity you feel comfortable with and being you is seriously a good thing already

motion to rename the sun into hate orb