While Chans, IRC and the melting pots of old withered and died or morphed into an unholy union of $current_times, there still remain a few of us, left scattered and isolated in the dying Protocols and haunts of nostalgia. But not for long - many among us that lack Fortitude will pass into the high walls of the deceptively greener gardens of social media. They will thus be afflicted by means of mental manipulation and trickery, turning them into beasts lacking Virtues that made the Internet great. A "normie". A most vile and foolish creature that has naught for Fellow Man; an existence whose raison d'etre is to tilt at the perpetually spinning windmills of Labor for a pittance of vapid mass consumption culture spewed by the Satanic Mills of Mammon. Woe, for we shall all go into the night alone.

I used to be a weeb. Not anymore. I think the last time I watched anime was around 2014ish? I guess I'm just visiting old sites for the sake of nostalgia.

I think I've kind of grown out of weeb shit.

The older people get, the more likely they are to:
-Commit suicide
-Die from other causes
-Have health problems that make them tired
-Have less free time due to work
-Have less free time due to having a family
-Develop different hobbies than the ones they used to have

All in all, that leads to less people spending time on hobbies they had when they were younger.

So things like forums or image boards die off, especially when most people just stick to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Reddit.

>>23463
I do wonder now and then where all the older otaku. Where do they hang around? Do they hide in plain sight? They sigh and just join such places like discord and withstand all that putrefaction just so they can share a topic once in a blue moon? I have no idea. If I were to base the answer on myself, then it's much simpler: I see little point in sharing. Each passing year I realize how many people treat anime / manga / games / visual novels like chores they have to complete or things to scratch off a list for the sake of fake worth points or something. I even often encounter people who seem to only watch anime because they feel that's "their thing" like some mindless drone, a different flavour of normal. If I go by that metric, then it's no wonder older otaku keep to themselves, with age this pastime because much more of a personal thing.
>>23464
I don't think normaldry is something that can be acquired.

>>23467
>because they feel that's "their thing" like some mindless drone,

I don't think that's mindless. I think people are naturally competitive. And when someone gets into something, they feel like they're personally invested into it. It reflects who they are, or at least that's what some people think.

Sunk cost fallacy:
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/
Basically, "I've put a lot of time/effort/money into it, therefore I can't give it up now." Very common thing.

Additionally, with the advent of social media, where people can show off to each other (or feel bad about seeing how successful other people's lives are), people want to be competitive in their lives, with hobbies or whatever. People don't want to just be some average baseball fan, or some average anime fan. They want to stand out and be special, rather than admit that they're just one insignificant person out of billions of people on a tiny planet in the vastness of space in a pointless universe. People want to feel important and better than average, no matter what it is that they do.

Books on zen and meditation can help with letting you just be more okay with doing nothing, or not thinking, or not comparing yourself to other people. Sometimes it's good to just exist. But it's understandable why people try so hard to be really good at something.

>>23463
You fell through the cracks, OP. No, they didn't killed themselves for the most part. I'm 31 and for about 5 years during the early 2000s I happened to be a forum admin for a reasonably sizeable anime/weeb community. About 200 or so closely knit group of people. From that 200 sample, here's the info I can give you.

Half of them were done with anime before reaching their 20s. They eventually got into relationships, had kids, etc. Moved on with their lives, many of them even before the forum closed down. Their main source of entertainment shifted to video-games (all the shit ones as you can imagine) or even regular sports. The other half still had a passing interest in anime but not enough to provide a reason for bonding over it. They did their bonds when they were 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. When we closed the forum all those people had added each other on msn, facebook, skype by then. Of course they all were using their real names and real pictures and that was about the time I began to fall through the cracks as well. Then smartphones came around and I know many of them have a common chat on whatsapp and continue to be buddies or at least have a way to contact each other. At this point, people my age are pretty much out of reach, so to speak. They are off to their own bubble and inner networking.

Here's the thing with that. This is also a response to >>23467. Most people in their 30s have no clue what an imageboard even is. Back when we were teens, we just used forums. IBs would probably feel like a shitty forum to many of them. Most people my age are locked behind private profiles on current social media vehicle or whatever smartphone chat application nowadays. If they do meet new people online, it's through dating apps. I know many use those.

Then there's me. And you. Old folk that for whatever reason managed to keep finding strange places to hang out like IBs, and for whatever reason stuck with it. I don't feel younger people invaded us however. I feel it's quite the opposite actually. We're the ones trespassing. Our communities died or moved on and we didn't follow the stream. Now, I'm sure you have your own reasons to have that happening to you. I know I have mine.

>>23470
Well that's a depressing read. I guessed as much with the FB thing but could never bring myself to join it. If it makes you feel better this community is run by a wizard who's not likely to close it down any time soon.

>>23468
I don't see how the sunk cost fallacy plays in this regard because the issue isn't that they don't have a choice of entertainment. They can just watch something else instead. It isn't like a videogame where you have a tangible invest you can see and feel. Plus, even if you're right, there are thousands of anime series, movies, OVAs, etc. that you can watch, so why indulge in what you don't enjoy just because you feel pressure to do so for the sake of identity?
>>23470
>They are off to their own bubble and inner networking.
That's a good point, although I don't see why there was any reason to close the forum. Plus, if so many so easily shifted interests, can they really be called otaku?

For me the odd thing is how young most people who watch anime are. I didn't even get into anime until I was 17, and even then it took me until I was 18 or so to actually understand enough about my new passion to know what it was, what thins I liked, etc. It's bizarre for me to imagine watching anime at such a young age, to not even be out of middle school while watching it.

>>23660
I don't see how it's odd at all unless you're seeing it as some sort of silly "higher form of art". For example, I started watching anime in the 90s, before it was even named like that internationally, with Mazinger Z and several Tatsunoko series like Time Bokan and Tondera Hausu no Daibōken, amongst dozens of other shows, alongside tokusatsu series like Kidō Keiji Jiban, Choushinsei Flashman and Choujuu Sentai Liveman. Then Power Rangers appeared from and Saiban's corporately dubbed-anime, which everyone just called cartoons. Until the end of the millennium, with Dragon Ball Z (anime came much later than when it aired originally in Japan, obviously) I didn't know what anime was and it was just known as "Chinese cartoons" with the most respectful of us correcting the plebs and saying "Japanese cartoons", but after that and the appearance or knowledge of otaku culture in general, is when most people seemed to get into anime as its own and specific form, with people making anime clubs, searching for VHS tapes, stalking local "black" markets for imported cheap figures, and so on.

Currently, with the sad and pathetic decline of western animation, anime is seen as more of a distinction, for an animation enthusiast, that divides the people with taste and those without. Point being, watching anime doesn't need to be a "passion" nor a hobby. It can just be an entertaining activity someone partakes in, and that's ok too. Also, a ton of anime is made specifically for children, so it shouldn't feel weird children can get into it.

>>23663
Nah, I don't really see it as a higher form of art, although I certainly do feel it is superior in many ways to other medium. It's more that I can't imagine watching anime at such a young age. I can't imagine being able to appreciate it properly, as I can see happen with most kids who watch anime. They watch it, but they don't really like anime for what it is. They think it looks cool but wish it was something completely different. They like what they think anime should be, that is with more western lines of thought, more than what it actually is. I think someone like that would go insane after trying to watch anime for more than a couple years, or into adulthood at all.

>>23468
Watching anime is supposed to be entertaining. If people want to be competitive about something, they should do so about an actual skill, not about something you're supposed to watch for fun.

>>23695
I agree it's pretty retarded. Take the people who watch anime at 2x speed for example. Sounds like it would take the fun out of everything.

I'm almost 23, so I'm probably one of those younger users you mean. I only saw Death Note and a few episodes of Hellsing when I was 16, and only seriously got into the medium when I was 17.

I used MAL forums for a really short while, and probably since my paranoia aged 18/19 I felt like I was older than the core userbase there, and at least I knew I couldn't fit in at all with people in college (pretty much just bragging about college). I posted a thread about Social Anxiety once and the responses were along the lines of "Get over it, work through it", "So anyone can say they're just depressed and get disability money?", "I __ (something about them achieving an irrelevant task from 'hard work')". I post that to try to show that the anime community isn't any different from normal people. I lost most of my joy in things when I was 18 and I doubt many people who end up on a website like this can relate to people on mainstream forums.

Also the mainstream forums seem to be centered around 'meme' culture kind of, where people act purposely obnoxious/edgy just to get a response. It's cool to be embarrassing kind of thing.

I would say you'd have more luck looking at smaller, older anime communities though. I've seen quite a lot of 30+ and some even 40+ on smaller websites. I would say they're relatively normal but the amount of posts about depression are higher than usual on forums like that (I guess 'normal' people would already have friends to watch and discuss anime with at that age?).

It really tires me out interacting with energetic people so I haven't looked at forums for a few years (I don't even use tohnochan regularly). I know lots of people feel depressed over comparing themselves to people so tend to avoid things (I used to feel this way watching slice of life anime where they'd have friends even). I really wish I found anime when I was 13 or so, since I'd appreciate it in terms of joy a lot more than now and some of the acquaintances I had in High School liked anime back then but because I'm retarded I rejected to watch it since I was and still am paranoid to express myself in front of my family.

There seem to be also a lot of autistic people into anime still as adults, but I don't really consider them comparable at all. If they're high functioning and have aspergers it's fine, but there are those loud obnoxious ones that I'd feel uncomfortable around. I assume you are also a regular person in a bad situation.

Oh yeah and my interactions with older anime watchers have only convinced me they're mostly weirdos. A 26 yo guy who had ecchi wallscrolls on his room used to ONLY talk about his friend with benefits and porn/hentai. That made me wary of speaking to people like that (people from here/wizchan I found have usually just been depressed). I don't know if this is true but some of those users on forums might be older than you'd think they just act like they're still 15.

Post edited on 17th Aug 2018, 5:03am

It's hard as fuck to stay active in your hobbies when you've got a full time job. Working 40+ hours a week just doesn't leave much time for anything else. Eventually everyone sucks up their pride and becomes a wage slave sooner or latter. It's even worse if you get a family. Those people are lucky to find a few minutes to unwind.

>>23702
Ever since 4shit got popular after the "messing with football" bullcrap, which was in late 2006 (Kanon was airing and I was watching it in 320p on realplayer) all of the same posers who infect any other field of enthusiasm showed up to the internet anime club with their desire for personal attention and feigned interest or outright disinterest in the topic at hand.
Social networking sites like MAL exacerbated the problem.

>>23793
Thanks for posting that image. I was looking for it and couldn't find it.

God damn normals did it to videogames, and now they're doing it to anime. All that's left is for anime to be completely butchered and warped to the tastes of those last two types of members and it's what the likes of CR and netflix are currently trying to make happen.

>>23794
It's a shame to think we're living through the period in which we will see the complete decline in not just anime, but hobbies that were typically associated with outcasts. I can't help but wonder if this normalisation process is deliberate...

>>23795
I feel like that decline is part of why retro stuff is starting to make a huge comeback, because there's still a sizeable portion of people who want the non-normalized version but no one wants to make that anymore so they re-release stuff that was already made

>>23796
I think a lot of that has to do with industries being creatively bankrupt while also not wanting to take risks. Old stuff that was once popular is a safe investment to them which takes minimal effort compared to something they have to make from the ground up.

I post on a few /jp/ spin-offs and the average age is about 25 or more. They are quite slow however.

>>23872
Really? I am surprised as /jp/ spinoffs seem to be quite young in age. The whole teenbro thing has some basis in reality.

>>23874
It depends on the spin-off but even the ones that actually have teenbros tend to not actually be teenbros but just attention seeking schizos, I don't post on these any more. New and young people don't generally find out about the spin-offs.

>>23875
I don't even know of any, I dropped off the map of everywhere for years online not interacting with much of anyone. Stumbled across 8chan and I really didn't like it. I remembered /jp/ and revisited but it's pretty dead to me. I remembered here and returned, I'm happy there's at least something still going on.

>>23794
If they get tired of anime and leave it alone, will it be possible to heal anime back to it's original state?

>anime back to it's original state?

You mean Studio Disney from the 30s and 40s? I would love that, Snow White really is one of the best movies ever made.

>>23884
nah, clearly he mean the likes of Astro Boy and Gigantor

>>23884
No, I mean anime going back to being good quality.

>>23886
I know right?

>>23887
No, I mean like right now.

Look, anon. You're getting the wrong idea. If anime becomes trash, it will be trash in terms of plot quality. My question is, will it be possible to regenerate that trashy plot back to a better one?

If anime becomes trash (in terms of storyline and plot), will it be possible to regenerate that back to a better one? Animation isn't the concern here, the story is.
To: >>23887
From: >>23888

>>23889
How are you going to gauge the quality of writing in the whole medium in the first place?

>>23890
Japanese culture is very prevalent in anime. But if the West had to kill anime, anime wouldn't be Japanese anymore. If I had to resurrect anime back to it's original state (like it is today and was back then), I would need to eliminate Western themes and ideologies.

My question is, if anime had to get completely destroyed by the West, like completely overtaken, would it be possible to undo that? I don't just mean anime having some western ideas, I mean like the entire medium being completely and utterly polluted with Western ideologies and society.

Would it be possible to undo that, if it ever happens?

>>23892
The Japs are killing anime themselves, without the West. Look at all the isekai and ecchi shite being made, and how it's becoming more prevalent in manga and anime.

>>23894
They've noticed this too. From what I've heard (not sure how true this is), most manga publishers have a soft ban on new isekai stories due to the market being over saturated and creators often having no long term plans for the stories. Ecchi shit meanwhile is shit sure, but it's shit that's always been around and always will be. I'd say that's something which can easily be ignored. I don't think it really hurts anything.

>>23895
The problem with ecchi is that it's lapped up by the ironic weeb types, which is another nail in the coffin. Even if a soft ban is in place, they'll still have plenty of contracts lined up for the next few years, so it won't have much effect.

>>23894
Ecchi's prevalence is a western myth. Fanservice is drying up compared to 10 years ago.

>>23897
>Fanservice is drying up
It really isn't. While it may have declined since 10 years ago, it's still fairly prevalent. I don't know how much the Japanese like it, but the ironic weebs in the West love it.

>>23898
The fact that it exists at all doesn't mean it's "prevalent" compared to the heydays of eroge adaptations. There isn't a single anime this season I'd qualify as ecchi, for instance. In my experience, westerners despise erotic fanservice and they see it as a barrier to "serious storytelling", so your interpretation of it feels strange to me.

>>23899
Actually, since writing this I remembered that ImoImo exists and I forgot about it completely. I stand by the point that these kinds series are few and far between, and this one in particular is too low quality to satisfy those who seek this kind of content.

>>23897
Yeah, seems like that was super common in the early 2000s and late 90s, but I haven't noticed much of it lately.

Its naïve to blame the decline of fan service over the past decade on intrusion by western influences. shitanro ishihara and the japan restoration party have been the ones pushing for increased censorship, its not church ladies in wisconsin that are at fault.

>>23470 again.
Today I came by to see how this thread was going and unfortunately it's steering away from its original intent. I thought there would be more ancient weebs finding this thread but apparently not. Oh well.

I just read OP again and his major complaint is that he feels like he doesn't belong. That youngsters just talk about college and life prospects. That can be alienating. But then, is it really different when you have people around your age to hang out with? About 2 years ago I moved back to my parents house and lived there for 6 months. They live in a fairly small town and everybody knows everybody. Sure enough, I was out for groceries one evening and a couple of people I went to highschool with happened to be on the same store as well. Met them on the liquor isle (I don't even drink, I was just looking at all the pretty bottles they have there. Wouldn't be cool to have pretty bottles for soda as well? Why isn't that a thing, seriously. Someone need to make it happen). Anyway we ended up talking for a while outside. A fourth guy we went to hs with just happened to be walking that same street and stopped by as well (telling ya, small town). So here we, four 30yo in front of a store, ready to talk about all the cool stuff. What they talk about? Making money. 90+ minutes talking about making money, every scheme, job opportunity, investment tricks, inside information, business venture. No subject was left unexamined on how to make money. I have no idea how to make money, that's why I can't even pay rent! I'm not going to say it was an agonizing experience, it wasn't honestly. I don't think I even care to be out of tune with people. And these guys are not chads btw, they were the geek boys, the ones that played Ultima Online and Magic The Gathering. Pretty sure if it were the chads we would be dividing the conversation between women and making money, making it positively awful. Anyway, that was the first real, long, proper conversation I had with someone my age since I left school basically. And there it was, still sucked ass.

I don't think had they talked about video-games or anime it would be any different honestly. Some people are just out of tune no matter what. I suspect OP might be one such case. They actually added me to whatsapp later that day and 3 months later I just left. It's just 6 people sharing porn and cracking ridiculous jokes at one another. There was nothing in there for me really. You know what I think it is? It's just some people, and I include myself in this category, are smart enough to have no fun with stupid jokes and sexual innuendos but not smart enough to have anything interesting to say, so real smart people don't want to have anything to do with you either. You get stuck on a limbo between apes and geniuses with no where to go. I remember being out of tune since early childhood days. I don't know exactly wtf is. So yeah I think OP is not really focusing on the main problem. I don't think it's about age. Maybe I'm completely wrong though, maybe he has a bunch of friends his age and it feels awesome for him. Somehow though, if he did find imageboards and one as obscure as Tohno, I don't think it's the case.

>>23471
Thanks. Depressing read really? I mean yeah, in a way, seing small forums and communities vanishing to become part of huge social media conglomerate. But remember, of all those people, I was the only one who had trouble jumping in, everybody else was fine with it, so I guess it's what they wanted? Truth is it doesn't really matter to most where they get to talk about the stuff they like. Just whatever, it's free and easy to use? Sign me up.

>>23502
>That's a good point, although I don't see why there was any reason to close the forum.

The reason is there was no one left that cared. We had like a post once in a blue moon and then the guy paying for everything shut it down to "re-design it, make it cool again" and it just never went back up again. Not that anyone cared really. Nobody cared. They had the FB group anyway. That was it. Now with smartphones people are not even on their computers anymore. You can find them on instagram now.

>>23879
I visit Kakashi-Nenpo and Merorin. Merorin has kind of skewed from being a /jp/ spinoff though...

>>23906
Not him but I went to Merorin a couple of times and it seemed mostly people talking about their lives, nothing to do with otaku culture so I left. Will check out nenpo though.

>>23906
>>23907
Merorin is more like /b/ than /jp/, I don't know how you could actually browse and post there. Kakashi-Nenpo is decent though.

>>23905
It's not just you, there's a small handful of people who didn't jump to social media and are just floating around on old, dead websites, talking about the old days. There's still a handful of active anime websites, but like you said most people seem to still be in their 20s while older people grew out of it.
Maybe it just is stunted growth.

WRT OP:
31 here.
Started e-anime consumption on dial up. Digi Charat (muh first) took about 2 months to get. This for a start highlights something we've lost. The community was *necessary* because you couldn't consume otherwise. Now, when the entire process from subject searching, downloading, and scheduling can be automated if you want it to be, anime is effectively a secondary utility you have piped into your house - not a treasured find.

The secondary value of anime before, say 2008 (Specifically when Haruhi made bank), meant not only anticipation & satisfaction, but a wealth of surrounding topics to really enjoy with like minded people. "The best subs, the best sites, the deeper meaning behind the translations" - none of which you can't today get with either google translate or one of the many content aggregators - or even aggregator aggregators.

So now, anime/the utility has to stand, i'd suggest, solely on its content - not the adventure and anticipation of finding something special or the pleasant sense of guiding someone else to moments of delight.

To make it to 30, you can probably put a cash value on your time, having sold enough of it to realise how little it's actually worth. Taking, say 3 hours to watch a mediocre story targeted at teenagers which reminds you of the "youth" and "vigor" you don't have any more loses pretty much all its appeal when you can calculate the opportunity cost without thinking too hard. If you've actually paid for it, then you've effectively got to justify "I have spent 2 days of my life (daily net income + viewing time) to watch a 10 year old girl fuss over nothing very much" - try rephrasing this to whatever you watched recently and were non-plussed about, see how enthusiastic you are about doing it again.

If you're particularly smart, you'll spend time researching either better alternatives through the myriad of services established, or shift genres to sample something else in hopes of finding something better to your taste. You may even find an overlooked genre that will provide a year or so of fleeting fulfillment before the cycle starts again (i.e. for the 12th time in your life).

But the first thought won't be to ask anyone - we've got web applications for that.

The question then really is, what is an anime community for? And does a 30+ y/o need that?

The modern answer, as the OP suggests is 'to be seen', like the edge-lord teenager's version of Opera Season.

And a 30+ year old survivor doesn't need that.

>>24122
In the case you’re describing the anime “community” is for the discussion of seasonal airings because as you’ve said all the other reasons that it used to be for are pretty much obsolete

I'm rather young so I can't fully relate to this thread and it kind of makes me sad. I got really into anime when I was 14 and around this time it was still niche so you could talk to actual nerds about it and have meaningful conversations. It wasn't until I turned 18 that westerners began to unironically enjoy and talk about anime, at least on a surface level.
The current state of the anime community is something that I have never seen in any other hobby community I was a part of. All I have seen outside of this website and a few others, are Stacies cosplaying and Chads/Tyrones wearing t shirts with Kanji on it. What pisses me off more than anything about this, is that they will go out of their way to bully and pick on genuine anime fans or literal weeaboos. I used to want anime to get more popular in the west, but now I have to watch anime turn into the new "cool kid thing" and it feels like a slap in the face.

The point I am trying to make is that, I wish I was just a bit older so I could fully experience the old anime community before it became trendy to claim to like anime. God, I hate normalfags with an undying passion!

>>24122
>anime is effectively a secondary utility you have piped into your house - not a treasured find.
Just something I'd like to point out: With the death of old nyaa and the closing of bakabt to the public, finding certain series can indeed be more difficult to find reliably. Sure for most common things it's easy, but not for more specific genres or simply just older stuff that people don't pay much attention to anymore. You can still expect to find some things that will take months to fully download just from the fact of flaky seeders if you're lucky, or possibly do some deeper digging.

>>24174
Don't a group of people ruin a medium you enjoy for you. While much of the perspective being represented in this thread is that of people barging in and hijacking the hobby, your point of view is different as someone taking to it more recently. Really, I'm probably not that much older than you, and have been watching anime and consuming other Japanese media since maybe 2011/12. If you're recently getting into anime and are taking the fact that these people exist over your enjoyment that sounds like it would seriously blow. Especially starting off, there are a lot of things you need to watch to get a feel for the different genres, their stereotypes, and developing preferences. Back when I first got into the stuff there was a big "grind" period where I watched a crap load, and I really did enjoy that. Just because it's trendy to some people, doesn't discount it all. Those same people would drop the hobby like hot coals the moment something new comes across.

Post edited on 18th Mar 2019, 5:03pm

>>24122
>The question then really is, what is an anime community for? And does a 30+ y/o need that?

The community is for sharing jokes about the anime and for sharing your original art based on the girls in the anime with penises drawn on them. If nobody else in the community is contributing to the fun then it ends up being pretty boring and you get sick of it and go looking for better companionship elsewhere. We live in an expanding universe so you can't expect everything to stay the same forever, learning when to move on if your community gets invaded by posers and turns to trash is an important skill, but just because one community stopped being fun doesn't mean that something similar can't happen again some other time, somewhere else, if we're lucky

The Touhou community is still good. One of the last "weeb" communities that hasn't been overrun by shallow teenagers.

>>24312
It probably depends what community. The Majority of Touhou posters on imageboards are secondaries. I recently did a test where I made a meaningless thread with a Touhou character and then I made a thread about the new game, only I didn't post A Touhou image in the op nor did I mention it was Touhou, I just used the title of the game. The first thread got loads of replies and the second not a single one.

>>24312
It’s probably due to the skill required and how much media there is to get through a lot of it. It’s also a shadow of what it used to be and there’s a lot of discussion over how the games aren’t as great as they used to be. While >>24314 has a valid point, being a secondary isn’t that prevalent compared to how it was in, say, 2012 when it’s cultural relevance peaked. It might also be because of how infamously dumb and passive-aggressive the communities around it were once upon a time that a lot of people don’t even bother with them. I don’t really blame them, even.

It’s kind of funny that people are upset with young people are the majority in a community around the media based overwhelmingly aimed at young people. I’m not even saying there is anything wrong with that, it’s just amusing.

>>24320
>It’s kind of funny that people are upset with young people are the majority in a community around the media based overwhelmingly aimed at young people
When I first got into anime, I remember the community being full of preteens and that never really bothered me. I think the problem a lot of people have is that the mindest of the community has shifted from a bunch of nerds cracking jokes and spamming japanese emoticons, to obnoxious teenagers using "hip" lingo and only having a shallow interest in anime. That's the way I see it at least.
This whole "Nerd culture" thing that has dominated this decade is on it's way out anyways so I'm sure these kinds of people will leave this community when something trendier comes along.

I think even this place will eventually get overrun by normals if certain "meme" ideas get big enough. Politics by its very nature is inextricably linked to nomralcy, what is moral and how the normal world should enforce it's morals. It has to be, the whole point of politics is to determine what, or who, is outcast from society and who is not. If that mindset of trying to enforce social normalcy grows enough here, you WILL see the board become more and more normalized. Having an owner who actually cares about otaku culture will stem the tide quite a lot, but it's inevitable that you're going to see discussion become more and more tailored towards the idea of social morality, culture wars, and worse. Look at how 4 /a/ anime culture got co-opted and dragged into the political battleground. Now people there openly mock waifufags, calling them inc3l virgin losers, and it's not just a few outsiders, it's the whole damn board. I don't think there's anything tohno can do to stop it, unfortunately, and one day I'm sure he's going to shut down the site in disgust. I've been thinking of leaving the internet altogether, but it would be really painful to not have a place to talk about anime without the horrible mainstream culture infecting discussion.

>>25338
>Now people there openly mock waifufags, calling them inc3l virgin losers
You're saying this in the context of the current opinions on waifuism but I have to ask about that sentence from a different point of view. Do you at the same time consider the "inc3l virgin losers" to be a correctly identified group of undesirables that is being rightly bashed?
Because I'm one of them.

>>25339
Not him, but I avoid that word because it's a term that normals define and use. They sling it around so casually, it's kind of infuriating.

>>25338
What about a place like gurochan? If the topic of your site is so far-removed from normalcy, doesn't that give it immunity?

>>25338
>>25340
You just have to be completely focused on yourself. People who want to moralize and talk about "culture wars", AND "inc3ls", whiny cunts who actually define themself by their inability to have sex with 3dpd despite wanting to, are both a cancer I don't want on tohno-chan.

>>25340
I do my best to not put anyone any under labels, people are highly interconnected by an infinite number of things in their personal lives I'll never know or completely understand. This causes a lot of intersecting areas we label people in as. Consciousness is its own network and we're it's various points. It's usually best to interact with the person and their specific even if very similar to their designated groups collective views cause they'll always have those unique traits that just happened to put them there.

>>25342
Yes just do this and while observing everyone else have your own set of morals based on your own experience. Finding yourself falling for hive mind nonsense is hard cause sometimes it happens and you don't even realize it at the time. But we'll always have that, we function upon layers and layers of programming from all sorts of things. If you stripped all that away would you even be human at all anymore? What that chaos creates is what the physical plays out on.

>>25342
What an asshole. Guess what, I don't want your kind on tohno.

>>25344
I don't think he's really wrong. The people he's talking about make themselves and everyone around them miserable when they don't need to.

>>25344
Go make a thread on /so/ about how you want a gf, or want sex, or how you wish you were super good looking so you could be "alpha", or putting stacys into a concentration camp. Whatever it is they talk about. See what kind of reception you get.

This is back up again. Well, I guess since this thread is about the species I belong to so to speak, I'll just talk about the process of my extinction.
>Where the fuck are all the 30+ weebs?
I'll be 34 this year so I can at least answer for myself. Past year my favorite manga artist passed away and since, I've been reading his stuff along with every volume of Doraemon again. Ironicaly for the very first time in my life I've managed to have some sort of income so I finally have some money to buy his works, but if I buy his stuff now it's all going to the wife or whatever. Not that I care but it's definitely not going to the author, unless I burn some ghost money if that's real at all. My taste in manga was pretty isolating in itself but since Mr. Azuma passed away my drive to read new manga diminished a great deal and I sort of crawled back to the stuff I've already read in the past. Well, just check the /ma/ right now and you'll see for yourself how much of a community there is for manga readers. Last post was in january.
I think there's two types of old weeb. There's the one that just don't care anymore about being part of a community and just leaves. Then there's the type who wants to be part of a community but just can't. I'm the latter. Now, I say this with no ill intent at all, but I just can't watch 99% of the stuff I see people watching on /an/. I can't silence the opinion in my head that's all garbage. If I use my reason to analyze this opinion, it's very clear to me that I've become too strict to my old ways and my tastes have solidified and the stuff I like is not better or worse, but simply the stuff I've watched during my formation years. That's what, within strict reason, I believe to be the case, however, emotionally I still think it's garbage and I can't bother to watch it. I'm sure it's obvious to anyone here that if you want to participate and feel part of a Japanese culture community like this one, you must watch at least some of the recent anime otherwise it's pretty difficult for you to connect to anyone. And I can't watch the stuff people are talking about. And this is the one thing that makes the gap; taste changes between generations. In my case it's worse because I don't really care for anime and nobody reads manga, new or old titles. Hell, I think next post we get on /ma/ is going to be me posting about Mr. Kazuki Motoyama's passing and a google drive link to his work. That's the main reason I post in Tohno at all is to remember people these guys exist. I'm pretty sure no one else is going to post about them.
I'm pretty sure I could be a better member of this community. For example I could post more about manga, I'm sure I could make a few titles sound interesting enough for other people to jump in but then I would have to be less depressed and drunk that I am currently (those have nothing to do with being a weeb I asure you) to keep up with this. I'm almost convinced if I could make a decent post about some of those titles I could build a small group of 3 or 4 people here and we could have a lot of fun reading some of that stuff together. All I need is a couple of people willing to give it a try and to be able to read Japanese. And I would need to not be gloom half the time and drunk the other half. Well I'm sure I'll be able to pull it off eventually. Oh well

>>25347
its truly a pitty /ma/ doesnt get much traffic.I too am dissapointed by the newer stuff so i just browse through older ones.
You can go ahead with the recs just skip the jap ones cause im a filthy eop

>>25347
>I can't watch the stuff people are talking about.
I'm way below 30, but I don't either. The stuff people talk about constantly changes. Something from 2013 seems really recent to me, but unless it's part of a much larger franchise, like Love Live or Girls and Panzer(neither of which i'm into), it's considered "old news" by most. I can't and don't want to keep up with what's currently airing. Tohno-chan is better in that regard because if you do bring something up from before 2010, there's a good enough chance people will know about it and be willing to discuss it.

>>25347
>I'm pretty sure I could be a better member of this community. For example I could post more about manga,

Yes, they say to post the kind of content you like to foster the community you want. Not to be rude but you probably haven't been posting much on /ma/ either if the last post was so long ago.

But part of the problem of it is the spread out nature of the board, the last post I made about manga was about Rozen Maiden but that was in an /an/ thread about the anime I think and I was discussing it in relation to the anime, I guess I could have posted it in /ma/ but then I would be double posting. That was also the last Manga I read, as I am in that in-between phase of not knowing enough Japanese to read Manga but learning Japanese and wanting to read the Manga in Japanese rather than English.

>>25346
These are products of your imagination. I don't post anything close to your examples. Your opinion is based on pieces of outsider meme culture fused into some biased image of what an inc3l is.
You're an asshole.

>>25345
Look at these posts. He's not talking about people. He's taking easy shots at made up paper cutout targets. Someone tried to make someone else miserable here, but it wasn't me.

>>25351
You can stop being an inc3l incredibly easily. Just stop defining yourself by your ability and desire to have sex with 3dpd. It's that simple. It's a completely voluntary group to be a part of. Where do you post? What inc3l boards do you post on?

>>25352
I always found the ironic thing about inc3ls is the fact that identifying as an inc3l is usually the only thing keeping them as inc3ls. It is a hard cycle to break though I understand and easier said than done to stop. The more rejected and abused a person is, the more bitter and jaded they become, which in turn pushes people away, and that makes people more bitter jaded. It's asking a lot of a person to make years of resentment just go away and start acting like a nice friendly happy person, often to people who treated you like shit for a very long time, but that's exactly what society demands of these people unfortunately.

>>25353
>the more bitter and jaded
I'm plenty bitter and jaded, I just don't call myself stupid names, or try to be part of group that exists on the basis of those feelings. I don't endlessly talk about and stew over my dissatisfactions and resentments. I'm not a nice, happy person. Never claimed to be. But i'm not an inc3l. Why? Because I choose not to be. If woman are so bad, move on. Don't think about them if you don't have to. Don't be part of some other idiotic group either, like "mgtow". A group about being independent, how dumb is that?

>>23467
>many people treat anime / manga / games / visual novels like chores they have to complete or things to scratch off a list for the sake of fake worth points or something
that hits hard, i sometimes get this feeling whenever i think about shows ive left half finished that i dont really want to finish them but i do anyways because....?

i try to usually only watch anime or play VNs only when I want to because forcing myself to do it turns it into a chore, but this sometimes leads into me putting it off indefinitely

>>25339
>>25342
I think you completely, and totally misunderstood the point of my post. What I hate are the normalfags who conflate everyone who is a virgin, a loser, only likes 2D etc, with the inc3l subculture of recent times. What I hate are the people going around calling everyone an inc3l for not being normal. Of course, I also can't stand the self-defined inc-ls of the kind that only talk about 3DPD and only use anime as some way of "getting back" at 3D women. Not, of course, that I like 3D women myself either. I'm a virgin "loser" myself but the difference is that I don't define myself as part of the inc-l subculture and I don't want to be conflated with them. They are very, very different from the internet loser of the 2000s. I don't WANT that stupid, social morality obsessed culture taking root someplace like here, but clearly it's too late.

i grew out of anime and anime culturearound 2013-2014. it just got too popular and mainstream with all the kids, no longer did I feel like I was a part of a special club for losers, seeing anime memes and stuff all over reddit and youtube, etcetera. That happened to the whole internet, the internet became too accessible because of smartphones and twitter.

I had been a lifelong gamer too, but with video games becoming popualr among regular people instead of being a loser thing, and the the whole gamergate gurrrl gaymer shit, I stopped identifying with video game culture as well.

Its just all the gay people and trannies, always talking about sex and having fun on 4chan and playing video games, and more oppressive than that is the women who invaded the spaces as well.

I do miss the old days when 4chan was a club only for the biggest losers and lolicon and shotacon was common trade.

The times they are a changing, WERE changing, almost 10 years ago, and now I just exist in the desolate aftermath. The internet sucks now.

Im only 25 but I feel like such an old timer, having browsed the internet and 4chan since 2007, I dont relate to anybody, I just feel like having been a no-lifer who browsed chans for 13 years puts me in an elite club that is fucking empty.

>>25375
Im not that guy Im just going to barge in on you guys little piss match over whos an lncel or not.

>What I hate are the normalfags who conflate everyone who is a virgin, a loser, only likes 2D etc, with the inc3l subculture of recent times.
Too bad, lncel became a hot topic meme buzzword, and it only proves Looks Theory that ugly, fat neckbeard fedoras and nice guy betas get lumped in as lncels despite the typical Lookism/lncels.co user being neither of these things.

Thats why I say that being an lncel just means that youre a adolescent/adult male who does not have a sex life. Its the most inclusive way of looking at it without dumb shit like wizardchan gatekeeping.

>What I hate are the people going around calling everyone an inc3l for not being normal.
An lncel being a loser adult virgin is not normal.

>Of course, I also can't stand the self-defined inc-ls of the kind that only talk about 3DPD and only use anime as some way of "getting back" at 3D women.
Like all of the people on this board, you included, who push the trite 3DPD meme? Everyone knows 3DPD is just a self-empowerment meme meant to give neckbeard otaku a way to disassociate themselves from not being to acquire relationships with real women, despite wanting to, so in turn resorting to a sour-grape anime fantasy land.

>Not, of course, that I like 3D women myself either.
You either like women or you dont like women at all, regardless if they are drawn as a cartoon. Is an adult man considered straight if hes only gay for 2D bara porn? Of course not. This is how ridiculous your argument is.

>I'm a virgin loser
yes
>myself but the difference is that I don't define myself as part of the inc-l subculture and I don't want to be conflated with them. They are very, very different from the internet loser of the 2000s. I don't WANT that stupid, social morality obsessed culture taking root someplace like here, but clearly it's too late.

It does not matter what you want or what you think.You, being an adult male virgin loser weeaboo, are indeed an incel. It is what it is. If you want to be apart of some underground true-loser club, the only last social taboo that hasnt been popularized is pedophilia. If there is some chan dedicated to lolicon and shotacon I suggest we form an lncel community there, no normies at all.

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>25376
And why do you let others to steal what you like?
Since I liked anime and videogames since late 90's, before any imageboard culture, I don't see your point. Whatever normal people likes or consumes is irrelevant, what makes us different is the way to enjoy it, the authenticity.
Being into something just because it's obscure it's not authentic, it's normal hipster behavior.

>>25378
I know what you mean, and it has more to do with not wanting to be associated with fads or trend followers because I did indeed like what I liked because of authenticity and not because of ha ha epik such a weeb lol guise!! bullshit every where.

Its not that I REFUSE to watch anime or play video games, its that I just dont build my sense of identity around it. Im just a guy who keeps to himself anyways.

>>25376
>>25377
I'm not going to explain everything wrong with these posts. There were no good old days because there was always orbiter, liking stuff primarily for the social aspect and it's "identity" faggots like you around. Looking at the actual history of western imageboards, that's clear as day. Get out of here with your shitty 3dpd pictures. Every time, it's people like you who break that rule. 3dpd is all meatspace humans. Not everything is about women.

>>25380
I am afraid I cannot understand this schizophrenic non-sequitur post, please try again.

>>25381
>>/ot/32982
>04) Posting or linking to 3D (real) pornography, Guro, or pictures of 3D (real) people.
- By 3D (real) pornography, we refer to pornographic videos and/or images depicting any and all real world humans regardless of age.

Post edited on 14th Mar 2020, 8:45am

>>25377
Get back in your tent under the portland convention center, tokiko.

>>25377
What part of "involuntary" is so hard to understand? This isn't the first time I've seen some ignorant kid toss that term around as a derogatory insult. "lncel" stands for "involuntary Celibate", not "old man", not "nerd", "not "loser". It's not that difficult.

>>25352
Stop with the wild guessing already. I don't post anywhere, never did, and am not part of any organized group.
I'm not actively seeking to "define" myself as anything. Which doesn't matter because no one really gets to choose the labels that others apply to them.
Keeping quiet and pretending like I'm not being included under that umbrella term when people talk about inc3ls does nothing. If I try to discuss my issues I out myself as one fitting the definition, at which point any possibilities of dialogue end as people default to their preestablished opinions and fill in the blanks with biased conjecture, as you did.

>>25386
>If I try to discuss my issues I out myself as one fitting the definition
I don't think so. There's bad place and better places for discussing personal issues. Any place that places optional group labels onto you that you don't identify with is a bad place. You can crave coitus with a meatspace human female, but see no way of doing it on terms you'd like, and feel bad about it without being an incel.

>>25378
i struggle with this a lot. its hard to get into it without sounding stuck up but it pains me to see anime taken so lightly and to devolve into just another facet of nerd culture. i say that its a symptom of a bigger problem with society today, but thats a rabbit hole for another thread

>>25393
I know what you mean. I hate seeing people treat it as nothing more than disposable meme fuel. I can't stress how frustrating it is trying to meet and chat with people in anime communities only to find most of them don't even watch any. To them it's little more than a fashion statement. Just today I went to a channel called "otaku general" in a server about Japan, and I asked if anyone collects figs. I shit you not ten people in a row thought I meant the fruit. Asking if they were serious just made them confused.

>>25393
I can't say I relate. I've been watching anime for 20 years and that's more than half of my life, it's impossible for anyone to take that from me. I just ignore people who takes it lightly, or try to educate them if they are truly interested, but little else. It's true that maybe it would be nicer to have more places to have deeper discussion though. But truth is the whole thing was never a "social" kind of thing so it's not that important. Maybe the thing I miss the most is the kind of community that could get you into obscure stuff or just new content you didn't know about.

>>25395
>Maybe the thing I miss the most is the kind of community that could get you into obscure stuff or just new content you didn't know about
Exactly.Thats what is missing.I cant even begin counting how many series/manga i have picked up over the years not by "serious discussion" or pretentious top ten lists or infographics, but by funny/interesting screencaps/gifs/webms and the like that i reverse-serched.
Also there was never serious discussion in imgboards it was funposting all the way,if you wanted to delve deeper in to something there were dedicated forums and wikis.And they still exist but i never found them interesting unless in very special occasions.The nu-/a/nons that start weekly discussion threads and generals in most websites or cancerous messaging apps are stuck-ups that suck the fun out of everything and are interested in upvotes/replies . the hotest meme template that is gonna get posted everywhere to death, or simply as a way to circlejerk around something.I mean you can visit the archives and see for yourself.Even /jp/ was all about funposting.
Thats what i miss the most-not that i dont have a place to browse all my free time but a place to find people with similar interests to discover new material from old ovas to doujin games.

>>25396
Maybe we should talk more about anime and manga here.

>>25377
Even though he got banned, tohno-chan is still going downhill like everywhere else and I'm probably gonna leave soon, maybe even today. Tohno can't stop it, no one can stop it. Times have changed, the western anime fan circle from 2000 is dead.

>>25397
I agree. I try to talk about manga as much as possible.
>>25398
Have you considered trying old-school forums or even resorting to Japanese sites?

>>25398
Sorry, I only joined the circle in 2005. I could post my thoughts on anime that nobody else is watching if you'd like.

>>25378
You make a valid point. Normals have always been into anime, though before it seemed to be just the more "unsocially adjusted" normals. I know many of you remember Deviantart, Livejournal, Gaia, etc. etc. in the 2000s. All of those people were into anime too. However, the difference between them and legitimate otaku was that the majority of them didn't fully understand the jist of otaku culture in Japan like those on imageboards (did) and constantly conflated and related it with western cultures and ideals. (Examples include improper use of venacular "KAWAII-desuuu :333 or the improper use of honorifics, calling western cartoons anime, etc.) That is the same thing that is happening today on a greater scale since the popularity of anime has risen so much that even the regular normalfags are into entry-level anime and other forms of japanese entertainment. So the "Kawaii ugguuu neko san) of yesterday can be now compared to the disgusting culture of having multiple 'waifus' among normalfags, unoriginal memes, and the constant onslaught of identity politics in a foreign medium.

>>25393
The good news is most normals only watch the entry-level seasonal shows. They will not watch something offensive or older. I find that it's much better to talk about old shows that I missed rather than new stuff. The quality of the disscussions are much better.

>>25398
Learn Japanese. Either that or visit a more obscure fourm or imageboard. But even those are filled with people who like to name-fag and push politics into conversations where they aren't needed.

>>25408
>just go somewhere else
guess what
theres nowhere else to go anymore

>>25408
>even the regular normalfags are into entry-level anime

That's nothing new though, actually it happened more in the past. In the 90's and 00's there was a shitton of anime in TV, so all kids and teens watched anime, and even random adults. I don't think today there's anything comparable to the Dragon Ball fad.
Like you said the difference is how normals use part of a particular imageboard culture. Also the general culture has become completely sick and repressive, and that means any influence is going to be more toxic than in the past.

Bitter manchildren who complain about shit all day are worse than actual children.

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

>>25411
>anime on tv
That reminds me that I really hate those toonami purists.

>>25413
>toonami purists
What? Isn't that an oxymoron? What are they "pure" about?

>>25414
You would think so. Basically they insist that stuff that aired on there is all there is to anime and the rest sucks. They're a dying breed fortunately.

Post edited on 20th Mar 2020, 9:53am

This is something about time. I'm a 33 yo man and I really love anime, manga, visual novel... I'm a full blow otaku, but I have job and do everything that a normal person do,
I don't have much free time, but I visit some anime/otaku culture boards to talk about otaku culture and I'm happy since the level of information is good around /jp/ and /a/.

>>25458
Working sucks so much. Right now I'm afraid that returning to normality will be traumatic for me (last weeks I've been working from home doing barely nothing). I need free time, why as an adults we have to spend, at least, five of seven days every week to someone else just to have a minimum income to survive? Why it can't be 50/50 at least? I just hope I can work less hours in the future.

>>25459
>Why it can't be 50/50 at least?
50/50 would be working 12 hours a day seven days a week.

>>25460
You can't count sleeping and all the shit you need to do for work outside your work schedule.
I spend two hours everyday to go to work, plus the time I need to get ready, clean my uniform, shave, etc. That's not "free time" that's time I indirectly give to my employer. My complain is how much of our living time (and energy) we need to give to someone else just to have a minimum income to be able to rent a room, eat and pay the bills.
I also spent years working 12 hours per day and seven days per week, that was living hell but somehow it doesn't make me much more happy about an average working schedule.

>>25458
Yeah, as I started work full-time it becomes harder to really care that much about hobbies from video games to just anime -- there's not as much time to appreciate the better things in life when you snap in and out of a crappy looping routine that gets greyer and greyer. Memories of a life with more emotions fade into dust.

>>25458
>>25459
>>25462
Yes, it's all terrible. I'm in a part-time position and still feel it takes way too much of my energy. Here's a funny thing I tried to do a while back. I noticed that the very fist activity I do in the day is the one I can put most of my energy in, so for a couple of weeks, instead of having working as my very first activity, I rescheduled my life and began waking up at around 11pm, doing all the stuff I wanted to do and go to work at 7am as usual, thus effectively making work the very last activity of my day.
By the end of the first week I was so utterly destroyed I had to switch back, but it was an interesting experience, specially how much you start not giving a fuck when you're tired at work. Really not caring at all, to the point I was afraid to get fired.

Worker drone problems on a NEET board.

>>23463
Will be hitting 31 this year. Just wanted to say you're not alone. I think most of the oldfags have gotten decent careers. However, that alone does not mean we don't feel like total outcasts on the internet with nowhere to belong...

>>25648
>I think most of the oldfags have gotten decent careers.

That hurt, I'm the same loser at 34.

>>25651
As long as you can find something to distract yourself with it should be fine - doesn't have to be a demanding career. That is, something that takes away your time and energy so that you don't really have the opportunity to laze around self-reflecting and pondering existential questions. I think dwelling on these things is worse the older you are. The optimism of youth has disappeared and you have more regrets. My regrets just happen to also include lost connections in past anime and gaming communities when I started getting way too busy IRL to keep up with them.

>>25663
I don't have a career, the concept of career is alien to me. I don't know how to do anything, I just go from a menial job to another hoping I can keep surviving until I die and no one notice I'm incompetent, nothing else.
I don't have any regrets though. I wouldn't be a succesful person if I had tried harder (tried what? who knows), it's just not in my nature.

>so that you don't really have the opportunity to laze around self-reflecting and pondering existential questions

You're basically saying something like, try to be distracted and unfocused so you are not in danger of acquiring the slightest touch of wisdom?
I always thought the saying "ignorance is bliss" was an enormous lie, the greeks knew it already, why we keep trusting in something like that?

>>25664
Because for some people it works. Workaholic colleagues have admitted to me that's one of the positive effects of working many hours and being under lots of stress. I appreciate their point of view from experiencing those kinds of requirements myself. That and I guess the money and social prestige society gives you is nice.

I actually think the "it's better to a more developed human unsatisfied than a pig satisfied" is a lie. There's nothing particularly noble about suffering. I'm not a masochist but I suppose some people get off on that. At the end of the day it's the grave for ALL of us including the self-righteous with the "wisdom" they suppsoedly gained. Only real difference is some people have made their time on this rock more tolerable. I just think it's stupid not to try to be one of those people regardless of the mental gymnastic coping and material means you have to use to achieve it. If you're a masochist or derive actual "joy" from so-called wisdom due to suffering then by all means. Do what works. The idea that suffering is inherently meaningful and is for some purpose or leads to enlightenment is a mental cope within itself.

>>25663
Working doesn't actually do that for me, it does the opposite. I'm happy playing games and watching anime, work interferes with that and it's then that I start those depressing trains of thought about what I have achieved with my life and what I am going to do with my life. If all I am doing is playing games then I am not a part of the world so these matters have no impact on me, but if I am working it means I am a part of the world and my attempt at seclusion from it has failed. Unfortunately it's about that time where I am going to have to start working again...

>>25665
I think you got it completely wrong, in almost any context the wise suffer less and the ignorant suffer more. Because when you are ignorant you don't know yourself, you have wrong expectatives, you don't know what you can do and your limitations so you get frustrated. Frustration comes from the inadequation of expectations and reality, so literally, from lack of knowledge.
This makes me remember of the kind of guy that destroys himself with drugs and bad habits and considers some other, more stoich, frugal and balanced, to be in suffering and not enjoying life.
The whole thing of working so much so you don't have time to think sounds like my idea of hell.
I couldn't live like that, I mean, you need to distract yourself of life itself and the most meaningful activity of your own brain? I can only think living like that because being afraid of dying, but there's no positive reason that could support it.

>>25667
Knowing yourself to the limited extent of knowing what reduces your suffering and/or existential dread is enough. I think you are ignoring the fact that all people are different and for some knowingly trying to be ignorant of some things as a cope (blurring it with work, entertainment and other materialistic indulgence etc.) is an effective option. That is, they respond best to it. Trying to be an armchair philosopher and overthinking things in the pursuit of more "wisdom" about why you came about, what grand purpose you serve and reasons for everything else in the world isn't a panacea for everyone. You do what works for you and it may even involve drugs (legal SSRIs or otherwise). I can see going out on a comfy drug high as perfectly rational if you're terminally ill with clearly limited time. You don't get bonus points from life for trying to endure the terminal pain as a sober stoic overthinking why you deserved or didn't deserve to die and what purpose you served until the very end. Some people would rather not do that.

>>25665
>>25666
>>25667
>>25668
What about living for somebody besides yourself? Maybe you could be satisfied slaving away or anything else if you think it's for the sake of somebody you love or some cause you care about for some reason. I don't know what that feeling is like, but maybe it's really nice. Aren't people supposed to have things they would die for, or does that only exist in fiction?

>>25668
I'm all for escapism, but not to escape from yourself. You don't need to be a philosopher or anything, but I can't see how to supress your own thoughts can take you anywhere. Besides that, I doubt it's possible and they are still going to be there when you end whatever it was distracting you.
About illness, I just remembered an story about an old king who got sick really fast and in some days was already in his deathbed. Then suddenly asked for a doctor to come quickly. The doctor came and started presenting excuses about how nothing could be done. But the king just wanted to ask me what was the illness that was killing him and how. After having the answers, the understanding, he died in absolute peace.

>>25669
Maybe not in our era, gernerally talking. We have killed God, ideologies and beliefs. I think we're not too conscious of it now but in the past people had big systems of thought developed during centuries that guided their lifes. It's like how today people preffer to die without being conscious of it while in the past it was the opposite, because it was a trascendental moment that wasn't too good to miss.

>>25670
Effective free thought suppression is possible for many people although not saying it may be for you. Venerable meditation, martial arts, education and interrogation programs are built on forcing your brain to act a certain way and believe a certain thing no questions asked. With enough discipline you can learn to empty your thoughts while meditating. With the proper external stress and psychological techniques applied you can be indoctrinated to accept things no questions asked (even to believe outright lies) through military training, captive "reeducation" (most often associated with Communists) or intense enough vocational programs. When they work properly they shred your free thoughts on a matter (e.g. what is my purpose?) and rebuild you based on a mold. There are also legal and illegal "happy pill" types drugs on top meant to slow down your brain activity from all that overthinking.

>>25669
I think it's still possible whether someone spends decades thinking it out or simply accept a purpose assigned to them as an axiom (being naturally "simple minded" or indoctrinated).

Well Tohno, it happened. I'm no longer in my early 30s, I now find myself in my mid 30s instead. It's September the 18th, it's my birthday and I'm 34 years old. I've been having this nagging feeling that I should have something to say about it, so I decided to use the only type of "say" I use most of the time, and that is writing a post on an IB, one I really like and respect, so here. I like your longevity and self-effacing demeanour, cheers. I did some research for this post too, I went to social media and looked for all people I know were weebs on their adolescence and young adulthood, 10 to 15 years ago. People I posted in forums with, chatted on ICQ and MSN, people I met in games like Ragnarok, Kaillera clients and so on. How time flies. Oh and I have a surprise for you guys at the end, I'm like a retail store that give gifts instead of getting them for their birthday, so you'll have that for stomaching through this post. I feel like this will be a long one, so you might want to save it for when you're quite bored and you're doing your ib rounds, desperately looking for new posts to read. Here's one will distract you for a few minutes. Here we go.
I'll be again sharing the fate of some old weebs, or ex-weebs, those who "mended" and managed to become productive citizens of this crazy world, and where they vanished to. I looked several people up. All of them watched tons of anime and it was all we would talk about. I'm talking about early days of fansubs, 15 years or so ago. I'm surprised a lot of them have children now. Maybe a lot of them have enough financial stability to have children. I look at their lives and I'm happy to say I'm honestly glad for them. I don't feel any remorse or regret toward my place in this world anymore, in fact, all things considered, is quite a nice, little life. Sure it's not for everyone. Many people would say it's too frugal, cooking all your meager meals, mending your decade old clothing to save pennies and so on, but you know what, I really belong to this life after all.
Sometimes I'll spend a long time just gazing through my bedroom window, looking at all the people coming and going during rush hour. I specially like to look at the streets on friday afternoons when people are bustling, talking with friends, laughing, going back home, getting ready to relax, etc. I used to look at them and think with some pleasure that I was living in a different world, like a ghost gazing at aliens. Now I feel the exact opposite. I look at those people with lives so different from my own and I feel I'm part of this world. It's a strange realization and I'm not sure how to explain it, but it does feel good to be part of this world, finally, to accept things and myself the way they are. It's also hard to trace how this whole thing came about.
It's a little bit like that zen saying I suppose. Before studying zen, mountains are mountains. After a glimpse of zen, mountains are no longer mountains. After enlightment, mountains are mountains again. Now, I don't know much about zen but to me at this point in life I can make some sense of it. To have lived enough to take things for what they are without trying to escape anymore. Maybe this saying has nothing to do with that, but I like to imagine it's talking about something like that.
So, where are all the 30+ weebs? There aren't many, but at least I'm here, I hope that makes other 30+ users out there a little bit more comfortable. You're not that much of a rarity I guess. So yeah, there you go. I'm sorry about the blogging. Since it's my birthday today I've been reading things that reminds me of my childhood. I use to love Mystical Ninja Goemon for the N64 growing up. Me and my brother would play it to death. Years ago I found out there was actually manga released with the characters, authored by the late Mr. Hiroshi Obi (died in 2014 from a brain hemorrhage, rip Mr. Obi) published by Kodansha. Those are fairly difficult to find if you're not willing to actually buy it from Mandarake or something. I'll be sharing with you guys one of Mr. Obi's first volumes based around the Goemon universe. I'll post a link to it on /ma/ 'what are you reading?' thread. I hope you enjoy it.

>>25903
I'm completely different. All that only makes me feel worse.
Even if I was capable of "finally" conforming to the world to comfortably fade away I would choose not to.
Because it's not right. It's all wrong and unfair and disgusting. Unless it's somehow made right I won't meekly come to terms with being a part of it, being where I must be.
I don't care that they all learn to accept and become comfortable with the world as they get old. I'm not one of them. I was never allowed to be accepted as one of them when it mattered.
Now others expect me to obediently embrace the burden of aging and withering, without any of the perks they were given or allowed to seize in their time. I'm to "just get over myself already" and step back into the flow of things to slowly die somewhere out of sight.

It's infuriating.

>>25905
>Now others expect me to obediently embrace the burden of aging and withering
What's the alternative? What do you intend to do besides "embrace" aging? Dying right now would suit others just as well as you conforming. If you pick the former, you're no longer a burden, if you pick the latter, you're also no longer a burden.

>>25903
That was a nice post, thank you for sharing.

>>25906
Not him, but I'd say not living by the standards and expectations of people who are __ years old.

>>25903
Coincidentally I turned 34 just some months ago.
Do you ever feel regreet? Lack of something?
I don't think our kind makes it past their 30's in too many occasions. Not saying we suffer from an high mortality, maybe there's just not too many of us to start with. I have to say I never meet one of our kind in real life.
Since there's so few cases it's interesting to see how maturity works in them, in us. I can't say I'm that close to that zen state you describe, but I'm not particularly unhappy, maybe because I don't feel like fighting reality too often. And I'm in a better situation (in work, money, etc) than ever, at the end material conditions count the most for almost any person.
I feel terribly old though. I have probably lived more than half of my life and my only real ties with other humans can be reduced to my mother, who will leave this world sooner or later. It's a weird feeling.
Also, coincidentally, I think I've been doing stuff like you said, to remember old days. Watched movies I haven't watched in 15 years and I rewatched Evangelion after more than 10 years from last time. I feel like if I had tried to do the same just 4-5 years ago, nostalgia and melancholy could have crushed me, but I did just fine. Still, I don't know if I could do it as fine with other, more touching, things.

>>25905
I'm sorry my post made you upset. You're right, world and people can be beyond fucked up and you don't have to accept any of it. I won't pretend to have some superior knowledge to offer you about this because I really don't. All I can tell you is that I mostly came into terms with my own expectations about things and living feels better when what you expect is closer to what is likely to happen. I might be wrong but by reading your post it sounds like you're expecting some sort of retribution over a bunch of things that happened to you. How likely is that retribution to come?

>>25907
Thank you for taking the time to read it. Don't forget to grab your Goemon copy.

>>25909
>Do you ever feel regreet? Lack of something?
Yeah, of course. I don't expect things to change for the better though, my potential is all realized at this point. I didn't amount to much in the end. In fact, almost to nothing at all, but I try to make a difference in people's lives in a positive, however fleeting way. For example there's this guy on youtube who has been uploading rare, old video game music for the past 10 years and he never gets a single comment. So I wrote him one, telling how much I appreciate his effort and content. He responded soon afterwards with two paragraphs about a bunch stuff about his life. It was really a revelation how people feel lonely out there and a single message can improve a person's day. I do that now for a few other channels I like from Youtube abyss. It's fleeting and some would say superficial, but it's something. Well, it is what it is. I finished Goemon btw. Here's a nice shot I took from an area in the game a while ago.
>Watched movies I haven't watched in 15 years
What movies? I'll watch one of my favorites tomorrow. Take a look at Mr. Vampire, a Hong Kong film from 85. It never fails to lift my spirits. Safe to say it's one of my favorite movies of all times.
>Still, I don't know if I could do it as fine with other, more touching, things.
Then don't go there. Yet. Put another 10 years in between you and those memories, maybe then you can look at it in a better, less emotionally charged perspective. There's no rush after all. Stay safe out there anon, wish you the best.

>>25910
>What movies?
When I was 18 yo I was into 90's wave genre japanese movies (Kitano, Tsukamoto, Miike), particularly into Miike. That was the stuff I liked the most, maybe because I was still an edgy teen but after some rewatching I think those movies are mostly really good.
Years later I also got into Hong Kong movies so I had Mr. Vampire in my backlog for a long time, I think I haven't watched it yet because the cast doesn't have any big names on it, but Encounters of the Spooky Kind with Sammo Hung is one of my favourite HK movies, it's a similar style?
I think I must had it downloaded somewhere, maybe I will watch it today.

>>25910
>>25916
Just started watching Mr Vampire and I suddenly remembered I already watched it time ago.
This is what happens when you download 600+ movie packs of all Shaw Brothers production and sutff like that, you reach a point when you start to forget things, thanks God I have a complete register of all I have watched in the last 15 years. Even if I forgot I watched it the movie was nice, by the way.

>>25903
>I used to look at them and think with some pleasure that I was living in a different world, like a ghost gazing at aliens.
I used to feel this way, too, but now I sorely miss being so detached. Having been forced to become more engaged in the world around me just to get by, I feel as if I'm wandering ever deeper into a desert without a drop of water. I've lost touch with some vital, authentic part of myself: left it behind inside of me in a place I can no longer venture. I find myself wondering if it would be different if I still had a place where I could divulge my inner thoughts, a place where others divulged theirs and I could relate to them, or if even the anonymous imageboards of my past would fail to connect with me now. I am adrift. I'm 35 years old, and for years my life has felt like I made the wrong choice at some crucial event flag and got myself onto the path of a bad end. Except that nothing has ever felt like a choice. All I can do is watch my mental health decay a little more each day.

Apologies for rambling, and being a bit of a downer, but thank you for the opportunity to reflect.

>>25938
In my experience, the more I get into the world, the more unhappy I feel, and getting more isolated from it always gaves me peace.
It can be anything, some human interaction or reading the newspaper, it decreases, even if just slightly, my mood. I think the rest of humans just work the complete opposite so if I weren't conscious about this I would be completely miserable.

Escapism is the closest we can get to salvation

>>25910
Is this channel a 500 or so subs that uploads the soundtracks generally track by track, and in many tracks he puts a picture of the Synthesizer/something device he has? Most of his videos don't have even 20 views.

>>25961
Shit, sorry to take this long to respond. I'm not saying which channel it is, but most channels on Youtube are wastelands like that. People posting stuff that almost nobody watches.

Recently I had one of my comments deleted by the channel's owner. It was really just a message thanking the person for making the content and assuring someone out there was watching it. It's literally all I said. If I had a YT channel I would be very happy to receive such comment but that just shows how different people are. I see no reason to obliterate that message but there you go. Kinda felt like shit for a while, wondering if the message was too positive for today's internet and the person assumed I was being ironic? I really don't know. I stopped commenting on this particular channel because I'm afraid instead of improving someone's day I'm making it worse.

>>26064
>most channels on Youtube are wastelands like that.
Yeah, that's true. Just the the day I made that post I found a channel just that way, and then I thought "what a coincidence! Must be the same", but really there are many like it.
>If I had a YT channel I would be very happy to receive such comment but that just shows how different people are
>I see no reason to obliterate that message but there you go.
Things like that happen, people act very differently. Years ago, 9 or 7 years ago, there was this big but not so big youtube channel I was subscribed to. The guy who ran it had this idea of raiding other people's livestreams, and making his subscribes interact with those near-zero subscribers channels. Most people were happy to see movement and people checking their channel out, but I remember the first "victim" of this was a guy streaming Minecraft to less than 8 viewers, he had hundreds and hundreds of people come to his channel, and comment on his live, and he just looks at the counter and says "Uhm, whatever" and goes back like nothing happened.

>>25903
I don't know how people can live for so long. I'm still so young and I've almost completely lost patience and interest in life. It feels like a drag that I just want to end. I'm beginning to think most suicides aren't passionately sad, or even depressed in the clinical or emotional sense, but that they've just gotten sick of being alive. Every day I feel less and less inhibition to the idea of turning out the lights. And it's strange, because there's nothing particularly bad happening to me right now. There's really nothing for me to complain about at all. But I think about spending all that effort to live to 80 years and die anyway and think "why bother"? It feels like life is just dragging on for way too long and I want to get it over with. Again I have to make clear, it's not an emotional thing. I really feel like this is a practical concern, like I'm weighing the budget of some activity or program and deciding that it's not worth the expense. Although who knows, the last 6 years passed me by at light speed and I only just found out how long it had been two months ago when I, for the first time, compared the time I spent in highschool and college to the time I spent out of it and found out that I've actually been out for longer than I was in. That entire section of my life, was no more than the brief period of time I spent drifting for what felt like 2 years but in reality was much longer. Maybe I'll hit 35 before I even know it.

>>26234
My life hasn't been particularly great, but I would like to live forever. The times I have thought about dying it was related to being into bad situations and seeing no exit from it, but I never hated life itself. And I hate myself, my self-hate is my biggest issue by far, so I suspect the difference with you is how I'm still able to enjoy things in the world. Even if everything sucks I'm still fascinated by so many things. I'm old and I carry all the weights but I haven't lost that.

>>26235
> but I would like to live forever
That would be my worst fear (and relatedly, if reincarnation were real then spawning endlessly on earth to complete the same cycle seems the embodiment of drudgery). I am fascinated by things, but that only really serves to counter the boringness of everything else.

>>26235
I used to want to live forever, but now the idea just seems tiring to me. I would argue in the past that we haven't ever been immortal and can't really know what it's like to claim it would be objectively bad. I still believe that, but personally I already find life so tiring that even if I could live forever, without eating or getting hurt or having any commitments, I would rather just lay down and go to sleep.

>>26237
>we haven't ever been immortal
Immortality won't necessarily guarantee good quality of life though. You can remain "alive" but stuck in a wheelchair because all of your bones have weakened and your eyesight has deteriorated. Or are we assuming that by immortality we also have the ability to restore/rejuvenate all bodily functions back to their peak?

>>26240
Immortality doesn't guarantee jack shit, because it's never happened before in recorded history. I could literally make up any random rule I wanted for immortality, it doesn't really add anything to the conversation to say that kind of stuff. But typically, when someone talks about immortality, they're assuming that they're talking about one that stops the deteriorating processes of aging at the very least. It's not hypothetically possible to have immortality if the body can deteriorate with scars or aging or anything because the body will distort beyond human form and eventually cell walls will break down and any claim to being "alive" will end, thus by definition not being immortality. There are too many different types of immortality in fiction and myth for me to cover them all in one post, but it's a good assumption to make when talking about it generally that immortality freezes the aging process at whatever stage it was already at, at the very least. Yeah there's shit like the greek myth where the guy turned into a grasshopper after aging for so long but I consider that an "extra element" to immortality beyond any basic form of immortality, perfect regeneration, or eternal youth. There's literally no frame of reference for making a judgement on the quality of immortality so I find it to be a pretty banal conversation to have. Almost all of them involve something that happens in real life anyway, does that assume then that real life is not worth living? We all have regrets, we will all see someone we know die well before our own death. You will watch your parents, siblings, and friends die someday. You will have regrets, and you will miss people or things or characters for years after they are gone. You will age, grow decrepit and weak and spend most of your years not being as fit as a 20 year old. That is already a condition of life, immortality changes nothing about that.

>>26241
>There's literally no frame of reference for making a judgement on the quality of immortality
Well AKTCHOOALY *puts on extra thick rim glasses* there's a species of jellyfish that has biological immortality(doesn't die from aging). What it looks like is it aging to maturity and then returning to a juvenile state in an indefinite cycle. Humans probably wont be able to do this because of our far higher complexity. I always imagined immortality to be like being stuck at 25ish, since that's fully matured, but right before deterioration starts.

>>26242
See always thought that immortality would stick you right around 17, which I thought was the perfect age in a lot of ways. I did start thinning way back at 21 though. As for that jellyfish , that's pretty neat. I thought everything like that was technically still aging and would die eventually after 500 years or so.

Immortality is part of what is motivating me to invest in the stock market. I want to live forever but I know that if that was to ever become a possibility it would be something that only the rich could afford.

I don't ever want to die.

>>26244
I wonder why immortality wouldn't become as commonplace as healthcare if it turned out to not be energy-intensive. After all, if it still requires people to eat then you've got yourself an immortal workforce. Out of curiosity, are there any innovations which never moved out of the phase of only being for the rich due to expense? Something at least 30-40 years old, obviously nothing to early to tell.

>>26245
We don't know what form immortality would take or how much that would cost. However, even if it was relatively cheap it would be in the interests of the government of the world to make it too expansive for the masses.

We are already going to have populations problems so having a population that nearly cannot die is only going to worsen that. They could try regulating births but it's really not possible or realistic and even if you did there would still have to be a way for people to have children and being a natural impulse large enough numbers would strive to do this so you would have to steralise the population at birth and make the procedure to fix that prohibitively expensive which puts you back in square one only with the added cost of having to steralise everybody and the political uproar that would cause.

In the US I think there are as they actually have to pay for it or have health care so a rare $50,000 procedure would not be covered, in civilized countries it generally is though. There may be a limit on that but I would not know what.

>>26245
>>26246
It's always a good idea to have money, I agree with that part. Another good idea is accepting you will die. There's absolutely no way you'll be able to live indefinitely. It's not going to happen with or without money.

>>26247
How do you define being alive? What if something could think without meeting the biological definition of alive?

>>26248
Not him but there are already computers that have more of a capacity to think than many if not most living things, insects are dumb. We would still say they are alive though so I would not say that a computer could be considered alive no matter how smart it was.

>>26246
You could always just steal it. I think if it ever got out that immortality had been developed, even a stop-gap, there would be people willing to risk a lot to get it, especially if it was impossible for a normal person to acquire it just by working hard for years.

>>26248
I would have to actually do some research to respond what I think alive means in strict technical terms, anon. One thing I believe to be certain though, >>26244 is human and hence he or she will definitely die someday. Hopefully many decades from now after having a great, wonderful life.
Besides, all things suffer decay, not only biological creatures. Even the sun doesn't stand a chance. Everything is subject to entropy.
>>26249
>insects are dumb
Rude!

>>26251
>Everything is subject to entropy
How'd the big bang happen then? We don't understand everything well enough to be defeatist yet.

>>26252
Even if the big bang defies entropy it still falls into the territory of the all encompassing killer: change

>>26244
>>26251
If you had immortality, even in a limited fashion that was still subject to entropy at the end of the universe, what would you want to do with it? Personally I'd like to travel the world a lot, and observe things like wars, any kind of war. I think it would be pretty neat to see how a guerilla war really plays out because this seems to be an enigma to the powers that be in the world. Hence the last 50 years of unsuccessful operations against tiny, mobile forces. I think in general even if my immortality made me invincible and I didn't have to really fear anyone as more than an inconvenience, I'd want to stay out of the public eye. Imagine having to spend thousands of years with people knowing who you are and following you around with cameras.

>>26256
Cult leader.

>>25672
Now that, sounds like a fate worse than death. If I could only see that in my future I would suicide as quickly as I could walk to a tall bridge.

Anyone 30+ still lurking around? Or is the meme true and we're all supposed to be extinct by now on these boards? Seems like every year there's fewer of us.

Granted, plenty of people get busier as they do advance research degrees, advance up their careers and end up with more family responsibilities.

Sometimes it all seems like a pie eating contest where the award is more bloody pie. Oh well. Time never stops back to being a net ghost.

>>26380
Maybe a more interesting question is if there is anybody under 20 lurking here.

>>26381
>>24553

>>26380
There used to be a handful of wizards here. There are people with families of their own on 4-ch, older anons just recline rather than go extinct, I think.

>>26380
I'm in my mid 30's. And I'm not particularly busy, I could still spend hours in imageboards, but I feel like that Steve Buscemi meme. Modern internet repels me, and I repel modern internet, but old habits are hard to forget.

>>26380
Yes. We're actually not that uncommon as it turns out. I do wonder how many of us are still weebs and how many just lurk ibs out of habit.

>>26380
I'm in my 30s, but I eventually lost interest in weeb stuff so I don't come to some of these boards much anymore.

>>26415
What are you interested in these days? For entertainment I mean.

>>26416
I used to like fantasy novels when I was a teenager and I got back into that. I've also been getting into roguelikes and some older CRPGs and strategy games. Also I have to work full-time now (I was a NEET for most of my 20s), so it's not exactly hard to fill my time; I always feel like I don't have enough of it.

10 years ago I binged anime every day.
Last year I only watched 1 or 2 shows plus reruns and the latest Jojo per season. Dorohedoro, Baki in China, reruns of Aria, and From the New World, and Jojo 5.
This year I am only watching Shadows House and waiting for Jojo 6.
When Jojo ends, I'll probably stop watching anime.

Anime is getting more boring. Moe Anime is declining as V-tubers rise because it's cheaper to produce and more profitable. Action, Fighting, and Mecha, Anime pale in comparison to what you can do in a video game. Romance and Ecchi lose to hentai. Miura of Berserk has abandoned crisp hand drawn lines to use a tablet and it shows. Togashi is ripping off Jojo 5 down to exact powers and the concept of Stands when he's not on permanent hiatus. The latest giant robot anime, Attack on Titan, ended with an 80% genocide as opposed to End of Evangelion that ended with a 99.9% genocide. Even the Edge has grown dull.

Anime, like all art, comes from the underworld and when Anime spends so much time in the normieworld, they neglect the underworld and lose creativity and things become bad.

>>26541
I don't think there's anything wrong with anime or that it has changed too much in last years, you are just losing interest because your particular circumstances. I've been reading "anime is losing creativity" or "x is killing anime" since the 90's, literally.

>>26541
I don't think moe is declining, certainly not due to V tubers, hentai has existed forever as have games, I don't know who Togashi is but I hate stands and think it was a shame they got rid of hammon so quickly in JoJo, the genocide in Evangelion wasn't really edgy either. It was barely anything at all, like the rest of the anime. The only criticism of anime I would have is that there is far more of it being made no than before, this is actually a good thing in that there is more of it but it means that some of it will be lower quality.

Post edited on 3rd May 2021, 1:38am

>>26543
Sailor Moon and its fans are the anathema.

>>26541
Anime has been dying ever since Felix the Cat introduced moelove to the industry. Ever since then, it's been a downhill climb.

>>26541
That's your mental illness/depression talking. Also your faulty expectations. There wasn't any genocide in Eva, that wasn't the point or what was being conveyed. If you watched it and thought "oh, this is an edgy bit where everybody dies because death is edgy", you didn't understand what was going on.

Post edited on 3rd May 2021, 4:54am

>>26547
Obviously we all live forever in the orange slime. Yeahhhh orange juice let me forget who I am that isn't like death at all.

>>26548
When you die you can't think. You have no mind whatsoever. Death is total annihilation of the mind from existence. And nobody forgot who they were either. There was no amnesia involved.

Post edited on 3rd May 2021, 9:01am

>>26548
They didn't die they melded into one, it was clearly a metaphor for the red menace.

I don't even watch or like Evangelion but Anno was influenced by the ending of Childhood's End. There is also nothing political about it.

>>26541
>Romance and Ecchi lose to hentai
Absolutely not. These are all 3 completely different forms of appeal, and most hentai anime is fucking terrible.
>Moe Anime is declining as V-tubers rise because it's cheaper to produce and more profitable
These are completely unrelated things, and as someone who seeks out moe/iyashikei series every season I can usually find one or two that fit that bill, for instance Super Cub this season.
>>26548
You realize they rejected instrumentality in the end right?

>>23738
I'm surprised by how late so many people get into anime.
I was born in '97. By age 3 I had already become 'obsessed' with Dragonball Z, Pokemon, Astro Boy, Sailor Moon. When Yugioh, One Piece and Naruto came out I got into them as well. By age 10 I was rent an entire set of anime series from the video store every week. It's been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Around 12 I got into Deathnote, Fullmetal Alchemist, Clannad, et al.

I stopped watching anime almost entirely from ages 18-22 but have gotten back into it recently, only to watch things that actually look interesting. I've been using image boards since 2010 just as another reference for anyone who cares enough to read.

>>26380
>Anyone 30+ still lurking around? Or is the meme true and we're all supposed to be extinct by now on these boards? Seems like every year there's fewer of us.
I don't see myself stopping from using these websites any time soon, so in four years the counter will tick up by one before resuming its decline.

>>26694
I've started to get into anime when I was almost 20 years old.

It’s been more than a year since I last cataloged what happened and is continuing to happen to a 30+ yo weeb. I would gladly describe what happened and is continuing to happen in any other 30+ yo weeb that is not me, in fact I would like to be able to catalog a lot of other people’s lives, but I find myself in the unfortunate position of only knowing my own existence well enough to carry such an endeavor. It’s the price you pay for living in isolation and I apologize for it. So, OP asked what happened to all the 30+ weebs, do they just kill themselves or turn into normal individuals? Well, here’s the current events on my own little and fleeting moment on this earth, under the sun, as a 30+++ yo weeb.

Since my last post (>>25903) I have grown increasingly lost. The more I thought about it, the more I found this condition extraordinary. How a person living on this day and age, where everything and everywhere is so well documented, with huge traffic signs at every corner, manuals about everything freely available with a couple of clicks, experts on every field, street lights shining every dark corner and clear roads and sidewalks leading safely leading to every spot on this earth, how then one gets lost in such an advantageous position?

The thing is, I began to find my actions to be incredibly and insufferably frivolous. I only ever did one hard thing in my life and that is learning Japanese. I did it because of how much I enjoyed manga and literature. Yet, it became an inescapable conclusion to me that consuming this media, or any other, was a completely empty action. I still respect and admire the artists very much, but the act of consuming their art became like touching a soap bubble to me. I come in contact with their art, and the art pops; there is nothing in there anymore. It’s not that I lost interest or have come to believe art to be unworthy. On the contrary, I am interested and still consider their art to be beautiful, but it was like beauty itself was something empty, and I could see right through its colors and stared at art’s emptiness. My emotions towards it, which at first was like a refreshing summer breeze that gave me pleasure, became completely still. Not cold, not warm, just no breeze at all. I wish I could say I had grown indifferent but that’s not quite the case. It just became nothing.

Soon, what began with manga and literature, spread towards all other facets of life. I realized all the things this plentiful and technologically advanced society had to offer to distract myself became soap bubbles. I was always a very mentally frugal person so I immediately noticed this; I didn’t have many interests this realization could transform into nothing before I realized things were missing. Maybe people with a lot of hobbies and things going on in their lives would take a much longer time to notice it, since they can just assume it’s a localized burnout. I had only one or two things standing when this happened.

I spent many weeks feeling like I was floating in an infinite ocean, without being able to see the bottom or the sky. I suffered from depression and melancholy before, but this was not it, that much I could tell. It almost felt like an uncomfortable peace… or rather, a peace I was not expecting or quite ready for. And a peace that entered through all the wrong doors. The first thing it pacified was my enjoyment of art. Usually you would expect or prefer that peace would reach the places where you need it the most, say for example, dissipating your hatred or your restlessness, not that it will completely stop the gentle breeze of your enjoyments. Alas, life continues to be filled with surprises, even for those who barely make any use of life.

At the time I was slowly going through Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad and when I finished reading, I read some articles on his life. I was very touched by it, and his life appealed to me more than his novel. Because of him I read the Lotus Sutra and that too I enjoyed. Not as a piece of literature, but as something else, it felt like it had something I was looking for.

So I began doing some perusing online on my condition and soon enough I gravitated towards reading more about Buddhism. The only thing I read before the Lotus was The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma but it didn’t do much for me at the time, this was many years ago. I read it again and it made a lot more sense this time. Then I read about the five hindrances, the four establishments of mindfulness and the seven factors of enlightenment and it felt like I was already looking at those things before I knew they had names. The more suttas I read, the more I liked what I was reading.
Dare I say it made complete sense to me. I’m not saying I’m enlighted at all, I’m saying those things clicked with me. For example, the first two hindrances of the five I’m happy to say I’m mostly done with, that is sensual desire and ill will. I noticed those things in me before reading about it, so imagine how delighted I was when finding those two emotions neatly in a list someone wrote thousands of years ago. I felt a connection there and decided to keep going this path. I’m slowly going through the Pali Canon.

It’s funny though, how I always manage to isolate myself no matter what I do. I would think that having religious thoughts would bring me closer to people, since many people do have religious thoughts, but I live in a country where pretty much everyone with religious thoughts are Christians or are interested in Christianity, given it is a western country. So then again I managed to corner myself away from humanity. I’m not even trying, which makes the whole thing funnier. I did the same thing by ending up enjoying manga instead of anime many years ago.

So little by little I’ve become a secret Buddhist. By secret I mean I didn’t tell my parents or siblings and I’m not visiting a temple or anything like that, though there’s one in the city I live in. The main reason I’m keeping this a secret is because my family is very anti-religion. They believe everything about religion is a political tool, a brain washing apparatus for the powerful at worst, or a bunch of idiotic fairy tales at best. I can picture how hilarious they would find the concept of pure lands, Devas or rebirth. Couple weeks ago I bought a small Buddha in a touching the earth position made out of resin and my sibling immediately questioned me about it. I told him I wanted to have a small piece of Eastern artistic imagery. He shrugged and told me I should have gotten a wooden kokeshi instead. They have no idea the changes going on inside my mind, which I find very amusing indeed. Basically I don’t want to shock them with all this Buddhism stuff, they’ll see it as nonsense. If they ask me directly I won’t deny it, but I’m not saying anything on my own, either. We’ll see how that goes.

Currently I’m a very indiscriminate reader of suttas. I already mentioned the Lotus and the early Buddhist scripture, and I’m trying to read something of everything in between. So, with all of this, what are the actual effects in my daily life? Not much to tell you the truth. If before I was floating in an infinite ocean with no bottom and no sky, now I can kinda see the moving sand underwater and a wide sky above me, but they’re still completely out of reach. It gave me some clouds I can gaze on while time goes by, slowly eroding everything and everyone. It’s a very interesting state of mind. Everything I look at, I see its end first. I can’t escape thinking “this will end soon”. Every time I look at my brothers, my mom and dad, I can’t escape thinking “they’ll die, they’ll end soon.” When I look at the walls of my bedroom I can’t escape thinking “they’ll be ruins, they’ll end soon.” I look at the road outside my window, I can’t escape thinking “it will be dirt, it will end soon. I look at the sky and can’t escape thinking “this world will die, it will end soon”. I look at the sun and I can’t escape thinking “this star will cool, it will end soon.” I look at myself and I can’t escape thinking “this body will rot, I’ll die soon.” and everyone and everything I look at, I see its end first again and again. It’s possible this is a way to prepare myself for dying. You keep remembering it until dying is part of your mind as much as it is part of your body.

It’s funny though. As a person who now has come to trust in Buddhist scripture, it would seem natural that my goal would be liberation, and yet I seem to fail quite badly at wanting to liberate myself. I feel myself so utterly scattered, mingled in with the elements I can’t find anything to liberate. Yet, when I read about it, it seems like something very good indeed, to be liberated. At least I don’t feel frivolous anymore, though I’m not sure exactly why, nor the exact moment or thing I realized to have the feeling of frivolity removed. My alignment with these ideas is a work in progress, but I can tell it’s very fruitful and a positive force in my life. I’m slowly realizing my profound interest for the Eastern cultures has finally culminated, and the flower that blossomed from decades of this interest is Buddhism. I kinda wished I had learned Chinese instead, since I would have direct access to the Chinese Buddhist canon but I fear it’s too late for me to learn yet another language. I don’t find any strength to do that again so I have accepted I’m stuck with what I already know.

It’s nice to have found something like this to serve as a guide and illustrate life for you. I was never a religious person and I never cared about it at all beyond the artistic value of religious texts. It’s amazing, you never know what is going to happen to you, even if you are locked away inside your bedroom, your mind keeps on turning. You never know where it will end up. I wish everyone would be able to find something like this as well but with the current cultural climate in our society, being able to put your trust into any religious ideas can be very challenging. For me it was actually quite natural, since I always lived on the margins of society, somehow I never attached myself to any modern ideas and confidences that would block me from it. For people like my siblings who have grown utterly sarcastic, confident they know everything and have a taste for mocking this sort of thing, this would be pretty much impossible.


What else can I tell you? We’re a fleeting shadow, cast at a passing cloud in a sky that will only exist for a single night. Be compassionate, do your best to not be the cause of suffering for yourself and others beings and learn to be infinitely patient somehow. Other than that I really don’t know. I wish everyone the best of luck. The world is a tough place.

>>27124
>I only ever did one hard thing in my life and that is learning Japanese.
When did you start(age) and about how long did it take?

Anyway, it's not surprising that you decided to invest in a religion to fill the void, but would you still consider yourself an weeb/otaku(in the sense people usually mean)?

Post edited on 18th Feb 2022, 4:25pm

>>27124
>They believe everything about religion is a political tool, a brain washing apparatus for the powerful at worst, or a bunch of idiotic fairy tales at best.
Have you heard of the Burakumin? Basically, because of Buddhist beliefs, butchers and executioners, while an essential part of society, were viewed as dirty and treated as second-class citizens in Japan. They were corralled and made to live in designated areas.

This discrimination still exists to some extent today and yakuza are largely the descendants of these people. Point being, Buddhism also isn't all love and peace and compassion.

http://www.hikosaemon.com/2011/11/when-talking-about-burakumin-never-say.html

>>27124
On Buddhism, it always seemed to me (a complete layman to religion) that the idea of rebirth was central to its teachings, because otherwise if merely death would be enough to end suffering you wouldn't need any other values or framework and could just kill yourself. That is to say, it becomes very close to what seems to be called "philosophical pessimism."

Or in other words, to me it always felt like Buddhism started its logical axioms but then backtracked when it realized that the logical implications were not conducive to society: the game-theoretic move given those axioms is to not play in the first place (either kill yourself if your expected valuation of life becomes negative, and to certainly not leave any descendents behind). So to avoid this, the notion of reincarnation and cycle of suffering across lives was introduced. Thus you now have an incentive to "play the game."

>>27128
Buddhism didn't introduce the idea though, it was present in hinduism and jainism. I can't see it as a pretext, it's just how those people thought and what they believed in, the culture Siddhartha Gautama was born in. Suicide can be a solution to the same problem, but it's not the solution Buddhism proposes, since it's considered as harming you and others. Still, in cases of extreme suffering I do think buddhism (or some of it) accept suicide as a valid option, I remember hearing about a supposed technique, from Tibet probably, to end your life in such situations.

>>27126
Started in my early 20s. Took me a couple of years to read shonen manga, 5 to read easy literature and 8 or 9 to read something like Teito Monogatari. Part of me will always be I suppose, though I'm a weeb with decades development, so my taste might be stranger than most in the category.
>>27127
Don't worry about it anon. I'm surrounded by people who would very eagarly point out to me something like the modern political history of Sri Lanka, a country with Buddhist majory and Buddhism as official religion and yet with its own share of atrocities, including Buddhist monk assassins. I'm very well supplied on people ready to bash my enthusiasm irl, but thank you, your post is helpful to me in more ways than you know.
>>27128
>>27129

>>27133
>Part of me will always be I suppose
Think that could be said for those who "move on" for other reasons?

>>27134
If they still care about it, continue to consume it with a degree of zeal and appreciation and can still remember why they first fell in love with the media, but that is no longer the main thing in their lives, I think so. If they've grown bitter and all there is left is irony and sarcasm, and they remember the stuff they liked with scorn and regret, then probably not. I don't know, maybe it's a case by case sort of thing.

The internet is for kids now. Maybe smartphones are why.

>>27151
That and tablets. Seriously, fuck parents who give 3 year olds tablets. I shouldn't have to listen to the same nursery rhythm ten times in a row just because you're too lazy to properly raise your cum mutant.

>>26551
Having read Childhoods End years before watching Eva, I thought it was pretty obvious.

Every anime imageboard I've been to in the last 7-8 years or so has felt off, incomplete to me, and I finally figured out why. At first I thought it was because I hadn't found the board populated by "my" kind of posters that I remembered posting with before a mass exodus. But what I finally realised after drifting around and lurking a lot was that all those posters were still out there, but no board was fundamentally the same wavelength as the one I used to post on simply because no one ended up in the same spot. All the different types of posters confined themselves to their own unique boards and this allowed isolated zones to exist. Without all the other myriad of poster types to interact with each other and keep things in motion, most boards become stagnant, or just went more and more along their own preferred paths of posting, content, and general atmosphere that they cultivated. With all the imageboards now in existence, without a single centralized board that brings every type of poster together under the same roof, you can only get one specific kind of community or another, and it will be one that has become heavily hardened against anything but its specific style of posting and interest. And a major part of what made a specific older board I have in mind so fun and fresh was the constant jumble of all these posters into one pot. I guess the joke is on me, because all these posters probably like their personalised zones to post only in the ways they liked best, leaving myself outside. You won't get the extreme opposite ends of the imageboard otaku spectrum having to see each other in one thread, and so there is no exchange of new ideas.

>>27233
What about those big ones like 4&8chan? I hear they're shit now but they surely they'd still have some of that content mixture you talk about?

I, too, am autistic OP

>>27234
Well, that's the problem. A lot of the posters I'm talking about left those boards for other places. Worse still, much of 4/a/ was repopulated by very young newcomers who had a completely different attitude due to social media and discord, and couldn't be shamed into lurking or conforming. Ironic that such a disrespectful generation destroyed a board that was made into what it was best for by its own chaotic disrespect. I genuinely don't think that it could be made to work anymore, because newer generations of internet users simply could never understand the value and purpose of anonymous posting. Everything is more about identity and interpersonal communication, I don't think they care for the kind of impersonal message-board-like posting that existed prior to their arrival. Sure tripfags always existed but even they were a different breed.

What I want in a board, simply can't exist anymore. People decided they would rather move off into their seperate closed spaces.

>>27237
I've met a few younger folk that learned the value of anonymity, but had to do it the hard way. Scared straight if you will. Shame there's no good way to do that in large scale. Even data breaches aren't enough to teach kids the importance of this stuff. They're all just that starved for attention.

>>27241
I feel that anonymity is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Traditional forums can have pockets of really good discussion (even today, but such forums are rare), and that's merely pseudonymous. The bigger factor is that the general shift towards synchronous communication instead of asynchronous works. Mailing lists are pretty much dead (outside of very specific purposes like lkml), and things like Reddit pretend to be forums but really are closer to the slow-end of synchronous communication given that threads are "ranked" with a heavy time-weighting factor, which penalizes old threads in favor of new ones. Moreover you can't even comment on threads more than a year or so old. So in the end it's really closer to the twitter feeds than traditional forum medium.

>>27243
In 4chan's heyday, like 2007-2012, wasn't it already so fast-paced that communication was practically real time?

I've seen archived threads from as far back as 2004, and the majority of posts looked like the same kind of inane nonsense you'd see today.

>>27236
Shit like this almost makes me glad to be "foreveralone". Who needs some cunt in their life telling them what they can and can't do?

>>27246
>Who needs some cunt in their life telling them what they can and can't do?
Probably someone who eats dino nuggets.

>>27124
Buddhism is currently starting to interest me too. I prefer Daoist texts from a philosophical standpoint but looking at the religion itself it strikes me as just being an ethno religion similarly to orthodox christianity, whereas buddhism seems less bound to the customs of a specific country. The religious view can in some circumstances be just what those who live in the margins of society need.

I already had a brief stint as a christfag a few years ago. It's been a long time since I've read the gospels but I remember certain parts of them such as "let the dead bury their own dead, take up the cross and follow me", and "those who are hated by the world, know that the world hated me first" began to stir my mind and I started to see past the contradictory and arbitrary customs that make up normalfag society, that I had been blinded by before. Unfortunatly, in the case of Christianity the only requirements are to believe that Jesus is the son of God. This requirement is so simple that anyone can do it, and they can drag in whatever ridiculous customs they have as long as it doesn't contradict it, making the whole religion a normalfag's paradise.

Buddhism, on the other hand, makes it very clear in its teachings that the normalfag view is incorrect. The experience of material interactions between bodies, the passions and the sensous world, leads to erroneous cognition and clinging to them, believing that they are real will only lead to suffering. It seems a lot more like an Ancient Greek philosophical school than a religion in some ways, practicing philosophy as a lifestyle rather than the sterile academic exercise that modern philosophy is.

Of course, it's not perfect as >>27128 demonstrates. It seems every human institution is bound to conventional modes of behaviour to some degree, no matter how inconsistent and contradictory they are. Normalfags either do not notice this, or they do not care, but I do. However, as long as I have a body I am forced to participate in at least one of these conventions and I am unwilling to participate in mainstream society. I have not managed to make any progress on my own so I need to use the tools that are available to me. I cannot even imagine someone who is able to be completly free of human convention, such a person would surely be a beast or a god, as Aristotle said.

>>27133
The way you describe your family makes them seem very ignorant and prejudiced. They may be able to come up with some massacres in Sri Lanka but I've heard some disturbing stories about Iraq that really doesn't paint Liberalism in a good light either. They way that people highlight the faults of their enemies whilst ignoring their own is simply ridiculous. I struggle to find any necessarily true cognitions and am instead drowning in a sea of beliefs and likely stories. When I think like this it reinforces my belief that it is necessary to go beyond discursive reasoning in order to gain any wisdom, in order to go beyond the state of avidya.

>>27273
>>27273
>clinging to them, believing that they are real will only lead to suffering
But ironically it seems it's those who realize the absurdity of the world that feel the pangs of discontent, while the normal cattle live blissfully(?) in their ignorance. And while I suppose you can meditate to still the mind and avoid feeling that discontent, you've still ultimately got to participate in the world.

>>27274
>normal cattle live blissfully(?) in their ignorance.
No, they have plenty of turmoil in their lives but it is not a matter of trying to gain solitude and wisdom for them. Their problems usually stem from their relationships and the employment that they all herd themselves into.

>>27273
you should look into Gnosticism, it should be right up your alley:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/Gnosticism

Keep in mind though that
1. Taking the Gnostic doctrine of the Archontic deception seriously will lead to an extremely conspiratorial/paranoid outlook on the world and may drive you insane

2. there are those who claim that Gnosticism itself was a conspiracy designed to lead to the destruction and damnation of its followers:
https://www.amazon.com/Satanic-Secrets-Jesus-Christ-Satan/dp/B09SGMNQDQ

>>27279
Also, according to Gnostic science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, "To know these ten principles of gnostic Christianity is to court disaster."
http://ww3.haverford.edu/religion/courses/222a/ten.htm

>>27279
I've already read this book but I couldn't really understand it. All I remember is a extremely complicated mythology that I couldn't keep track of. There are many different ways to cultivate a religious conciousness though, so it's not neccaserily a bad thing.

>>27283
I think religion is all fake, I just read about it because I'm a geopolitics nerd and religion is politically significant due to people trying to either live by it or to artificially fulfill prophecies.

In the specific case of Christianity, the more I read about it, the more I think it was consciously created for political/warfare purposes. Check out this article by Marcus Eli Ravage that articulates some of what I'm getting at:
https://archive.org/download/antimarcusEliRavage-ARealCaseAgainstTheJews/antimarcusEliRavage-ARealCaseAgainstTheJews_text.pdf

>>27289
inb4 you're just too closed-minded to get it/you haven't read enough/you're egotistical

>>27289
I want more pads in my anime.

>>27289
It's fake but it's still interesting and can be beneficial to those that believe in it.

I think religions role on Geopolitics is often overplayed, most of the time it was just an excuse at best.

>>27292
>can be beneficial to those that believe in it.
oh absolutely, just look at the Amish or the Hasidic Jews, the sense of community those people have is incredible.

>I think religions role on Geopolitics is often overplayed
Whether you mean the influence of politics on religion or the influence of religion on politics, you're wrong on both accounts.

>>27297
I don't think I am wrong really, even something like the crusades was actually driven by temporal factors not religious ones, religion was just a tool used to encourage it.

This thread is pretty sad. Is this what I have to look forward to as I get older? It'll probably be far worse by then.
I guess I'd better enjoy things while I still can.

>>27289
>Religion is all fake
What I'm really curious about is how it started. I find it hard to believe that a bunch of people came together and decided to spin a tale, so there must be some kernel of truth that got blown up by a game of telephone through the generations. Also this is less true for Christianity where there's not much in the way of directed "practice", but for many of the eastern "religions" that are often intertwined with philosophy and medicine, there are interesting nuggets in there relating to the workings of the mind/psychology that deserve to be studied in their own right.

But either way, most people seem to be primed to subscribe to some religious system as a form of anchoring to maintain their stability, and so whether or not there's any truth by virtue of their believing in it the followers end up getting a sense of belonging. It's the same psychological mechanism that cults end up exploiting. And even those who claim to denounce Religion (with a capital "R") still end up succumbing to "religion" (lowercase r) in other forms (e.g. "scientism", political ideology, etc.).

Another element that's often lumped into religion is extra-material phenomenon, e.g. that there's some "higher force" or "higher energy" that we're a part of. Many of the eastern practices are more explicit about this, e.g. you'll see things like "kundalini" or "qi", and there are enough similarities between the various branches that they either all originated from the same practice or there's something worth taking seriously there, at least in terms of the purported effects (disregarding the explanation of the mechanism behind it).

That said, after investigation of the above (through personal experience via Hatha yoga as well as just reading up on the notable people in the traditions), while I do believe that the _effects_ are real, I'm very skeptical as to the validitiy of the explanatory framework used. (That is, the fact that you feel a tingling in your brow when you do some breathing + visualization is true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the cause is due to some non-material energy.) And the fact that the people who claim to have undergone "kundalini awakening" or those who claim to be "experienced Yogis" haven't really amounted to anything substantial bolsters that claim.

E.g. take the example of "Gopi Krisha" who is supposedly one of the people who had a spontaneous "Kundalini Awakening." Sure he wrote all about it, but if you look at it overall, aside from a bunch of written books nothing else seems really notable. Surely a far cry from some sort of pinnacle of genius and creativity that he claims were the effects of this awkening. But fine, maybe he was a layperson who was unable to really put that to good use. Surely if you look at some famous Yogis you should see some wisdom shine through? Alas, if you dive deep what you'll often find are petty quarrels over things like "true lineage," supposedly renounced Yogis involved in land disputes, and nothing substantive to distinguish the "enlightened" person from a charlatan.

Nice gif by the way.

>>27301
Not necessarily. After all, the power of drills shouldn't be underestimated.

>>27305
The concept of "enlightenment" exists because an "enlightened" person is considered infallible. That's my understanding of it.

>>27306
I try my best to stay optimistic. I don't really mind being a loser, have been for a long time now. I'm sure all these kids will grow out of their bastardized form of otaku culture and go back to wherever normals go on the internet. Someday imageboards will be forgotten and they won't have the reputation that attracts edgy kids. It's all just a fad for them.
...right?

>>27305
>I find it hard to believe that a bunch of people came together and decided to spin a tale

I don't think it's that unlikely. Most likely a long, long time ago a few old men sat by a fire and talked about life, why are we here? Who made us? Why does Lighting happen? Etc. And they came up with theories and possible explanations and they kept talking about this with other interested people passing it down the line, they added to it and modified it and made it more interesting they created stories about these events.

There might be some truth mixed in but it would be lost to time, some of these tales might have grown from real life actions of certain people that were turned into legend over time and then turned into myth. For example, maybe Thor was a real man, maybe a chief who did some manly things and got bards to sing about him, people created entertaining tales about him and over time they morphed into the supernatural or they might have fused with tales about another great man or other gods to create what we now know as Thor. But this all happened so long before recorded history that it's impossible to know and might have been forgotten to time thousands of years ago.

>>27309
I was referring to Jesus in particular, since all the events told in the Gospels are quite specific and centered around a single person. And by all accounts (e.g. letters between Roman governors) the person was indeed real, so then the question becomes what exactly did Jesus do to get so many followers.

>>27308
I don't see things getting better anytime soon, but there's also no point in being bitter about it: there's nothing you can do about it but enjoy your interests and hobbies. Plus, we always have TC and some other small imageboards as bastions.

>>27311
Yeah, it's not all bad. TC is actually pretty good. I've visited a few times briefly, but never stuck around long. I'll probably stick around now. I don't feel like such a loser here, and there's probably good information around here somewhere.
At the very least it's good to have someplace other than Kakashi Nenpo.

>>27301
What itt exactly made you feel sad?

>>27313
It's not so much anything in the thread itself, but rather the thoughts they invoke.
Were things really much better before? Did I really miss out on a greater sense of community than a few slow imageboards?
Then I have to wonder, where are things going to go from here? The imageboard format seems to be dying. Especially the sites where I don't feel completely out of place. Will there be places like TC by the time I'm 30 years old? I've never felt "at home" on any of the boards I frequented up until recently.
Maybe sad isn't the correct feeling. It certainly isn't pleasant.
What do I know, I'm just a dumb kid.

>>27314
I'm 20, and I can relate to this sentiment. I hope there's enough people in our boat to coalescence some day.

I also think people view imageboards of the past with rose tinted glasses. If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit. So they weren't really bastions of serious discussion.

Post edited on 19th Apr 2022, 6:22am

>>27315
>If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit.
Yes there was lots of dumb stuff, but the variance was a lot higher. You could find pockets of creative, original humor and interesting, serious discussion more easily. Now everything is homogenized and anodyne.

>>27314
>Were things really much better before?
Yes, they were.
That doesn't mean there wasn't trolls, cancer, dumb shit. But there was a mindset and a sense of community which was authentic. This idea of being "ironic" about things didn't exist. Normalfag behaviour was shamed. There was a particular self-depreciating pride in being an outcast, weirdness was celebrated, degeneracy was a bonus point. Mainstream politics were rejected. It felt more juvenile, in both bad and good ways. We laughed at everything.
It was a very different place from the real world, with it's own rules. Now all the internet feels like a mere extension of the real world.

>>27315
>If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit. So they weren't really bastions of serious discussion.
I've noticed that. It's hard to compare the archive to how a board was however, as nonsense threads usually die and are created pretty fast and good threads tend to stick around a while. That's my assumption anyhow.
Oh, and people didn't always post the same shit everywhere. I don't know why people assume every board is the same or want them to be as such.
Either way, I have a lot of fun picking through archives.
>>27320
That sounds really nice. Some people still have that pride. At the very least, I do.

>>27315
>If you look at archives yourself, you can tell there was always massive amounts of dumb, inane shit. So they weren't really bastions of serious discussion.
Maybe it's hard to explain my feelings about it. At that time I felt at home, I felt that I had the freedom to discuss seriously when I wanted to and the dumb inane shit was something I was fine with and enjoyed because it wasn't going against anything I was trying to do. Maybe it's just a symptom of growing older on the internet, but it really does feel like even behind all the dumb inane shit back then, there was a different intent in the posters. People actually valued it a little bit, even if they were behaving like idiots for fun. It looks like people who post on imageboards now don't really give a shit and just see the whole internet as their dumping grounds, with no respect for any user-moderated culture they happen to run into. I don't mind stupid shit, but people who grew up on phones and twitter really don't value anything at all, even something as simple as an imageboards community.

>>27299
>I don't think I am wrong
That's because you don't know enough about the relevant religions, or about politics in general.

>>27337
No I think it's because you don't.

You're all wrong!
Now prostrate yourself in the presence of our God, Her Moe-ness, Yurie-sama!

>>27311
Do you mind sharing those sites?
I am always interested in checking out new places. So far TC is the only place I know worth investing time in and I really would appreciate some variety.

Another year. Time gently flows from the decay of all things. I’ve been attently observing the decay of all form, when distractions suddenly reveal themselves empty, which happens more and more now. You don’t observe the gentle flow of time like a person standing on the firm margins, away from the raging sea, but yourself as the very waves breaking at rocks and becoming foam; if you put attention to the tip of your fingers, you’ll see the flow of time as your skin turns to dust, a light breeze carrying your hand away like sand from a pavement.

What now, friends? Since my last post ( >>27124 ), I’ve continued on the path towards enlightenment, almost like there’s nothing left to be done about it. I don’t go around thinking “I need to take this step”, but “This is the only step that exists to be taken.” It’s not yet a completely stable progression, there are times I let myself be eaten by distractions, then suddenly I’m able to take a good look at our situation, like a flash of lightning making a night bright for an instant and I’m back on track. But enough of these silly allegories.

Six months ago, while I was looking at the trees being violently basted by the wind, a stray cat showed up asking for help. So I went inside and fetched a bowl with some cold cuts. Two days later it came again. A week went by and now two cats showed up, so I had two bowls. Would you believe it, now there are 3 cats showing up. They talk to each other. “Aren’t you fat? Where are you getting all this food?” “In such and such place, I’ll show you.” At one point I tried to convince them to be vegetarians “Here friends, try some boiled rice as well.” They had the meat and left all the rice, so now I’m purchasing cat food.

A middle aged housewife came to me one day as I was looking at the trees again. I could sense from afar she was rehearsing her posture to lecture me with chastising words. She told me “Your cats are making a mess of my azaleas, they’re pooping in my yard!” so I apologized profusely, and told the cats when I met them the next day “Friends, for your own benefit as well as mine, refrain from pooping at the azaleas.” The woman didn’t show up to complain anymore and I’m not sure how the solution came about, but it worked. It’s important to keep the noble eightfold path in your every view, every speech, every action, every livelihood, every effort, every mindfulness,every concentration, so at every passing moment you’ll grow closer to enlightenment. When dealing with humans, have a tight grasp on your thoughts, remember right thought, and what is right thought? Thoughts of renunciation, non-ill-will, and harmlessness.

Months later, as I was outside looking at clouds and enjoying the breeze, one of the neighbors came by while walking his dog “Hello there bud, I see you’re feeding those stray cats. I have some cat food I have no use for, you can have it if you want.” How I rejoiced at those words! I thanked him profusely. Isn't it nice when you’re given a point of fleeting brightness in a regularly dark world?

The third cat, he’s completely black and very suspicious. He never accepted to be petted under any circumstance. One day he stood by watching as I petted the first cat and the second cat as well. Then he allowed to be petted, but only after watching my behavior for a long time. I said to him “It’s very good, friend, to be suspicious around other sentient beings, for most are blind and some are worse than that.” I have three little bowls in front of the house and one large water bowl with water. I change the water everyday.

Sometimes one of the cats, I’m not sure which, shows up at 3 AM and starts meowing close to my window and I wake up annoyed. With my first thought I quickly grasp the annoyance, thinking “Why are you annoyed? Towards what end but your own detriment?” It’s important to keep the noble eightfold path in your every view, every speech, every action, every livelihood, every effort, every mindfulness, every concentration, so at every passing moment you’ll grow closer to enlightenment. In times like this, it’s important to remember right effort, and what is is right effort? Strive so unwholesome mental states don’t arise, strive so wholesome mental states arise.

Striving so wholesome mental states arise is not an easy task, but everything offers you help, if you know where to look. This cat has been showing up to warn me, at this late hour, saying “Time is short, it gently flows from the decay of all things, so hear, friend, how long have you left to strive towards liberation? Should you be sleeping so close to the end? Don’t you remember the words of the Enlightened One, on the day of his death? ‘All conditioned things are of a nature to decay. Strive on untiringly.’” And I realize he’s right. So now I wake up at 2:55AM and meditate until 5AM. When the cat shows up, I check the time. “Look at the clock, friend, it’s 3:08, you’re the one who’s late. Thank you.”

My dad had a rake I would regularly use to rescue insects from drowning at the pond nearby. He hired a bumbling gardener to help with a tree that may have ended up falling on the roof. After the job was done, this gardener used the rake completely heavy-handed and broke its braces. I didn’t see this happening, I just noticed the rake gone and asked my dad about it “The idiot so and so broke it, so I tossed it, I’ll get a new one”. What a tragedy, I thought. That rake had the kamma of a holy monk, having constantly saved sentient beings from certain death for the past 6 or 7 years, and above all, that rake was completely absent of self, unmoved even by scripture, like Bodhidharma would say. Now it was lying in a pile of rubbish somewhere, all broken and useless. One doesn’t need a charnel-ground nearby, filled with corpses, one, two days old, swollen, blue and festering, corpses eaten by crows, hawks, vultures, corpses reduced to a skeleton with some flesh and blood attached to it, corpses blood-besmeared and without flesh, corpses reduced to disconnected bones, scattered in all directions, corpses reduced to dust, to be reminded of the fate of all things subject to existence. A rake, a cat, a shat on azalea will do.

I keep coming back to this thread and I’m not sure why and if I should. But this time I have a good excuse (funny I would need something to excuse myself), this time I have something to offer. I edited a nice and clean version of one of the most important suttas out there, the Mahasatipatthana or The Great Discourse on the Establishing of Mindfulness. This sutta is like a hammer, it’s a tool to be put to practice. It’s short enough for you to memorize it. I also added in there a nice diagram of the 4 noble truths. I hope it’s useful. Hopefully you can appreciate it at any level, even if it’s just as a curious piece of literature. There are many beautiful passages in there. If nothing else, read The Nine Charnel-Ground Contemplations located on the Contemplation of the Body session. It takes like 4 minutes to go through it.

I've made 3 files. A PDF, here:
https://anonfiles.com/v0f7r4T6yf/Mah_satipa_h_na_Sutta_pdf
An epub you can download at:
https://anonfiles.com/x6u8hfTcy4/Mahasatipatthana_Sutta_-_The_Great_Discourse_on_the_Establishing_of_Mindfulness_-_Anonymous_epub
Finally, I've made an html file of it, it's hosted at: https://mahasatipatthana.neocities.org/
I’ll probably post these files and link in another ib or two, we’ll see.

And that’s that, friends. I guess I’ll see you next year, if we live. Or not. Be as it may, I hope you’re well and when/if you’re not, to put in the effort in the right places to be able to bear it.

>>27976
>At one point I tried to convince them to be vegetarians
Cats are obligate carnivores. You'd know that if you learned a bit about biology.

>>23464
Fortunately for me it's the opposite regarding social media: I finally gave up all kinds of social media, including the "alternatives" ones. I only keep twitter and only for following artists I like. As about communications with relatives, I only use viber.

>>28013
The irony of this post is palpable

>>28013
Should newfags message you on IRC?

>>27976
It's good that you're feeding the cats, but you have a right to be annoyed if the cat is waking you up. What purpose could he have for meowing at your window, other than to be let in?
He's being a bother.

>>28013
This better be an avant-garde jest.

>>28014
Oh, I'm sorry for not using chat apps nobody uses!

>>28017
Huh?

>>28019
IRC isn't an app...

Post edited on 7th Feb 2023, 8:14am

>>28021
Can't expect much from somebody who openly shares their social details when they haven't even been asked for them.

>>28013
>>28019
Well, you can't be an oldfag at all, can you?

>>28021
To be fair, there are apps that let you connect to IRC.

>>28019
You're asking oldfags to use something that is popular with newfags. I think that's what other anons are saying is ironic. Then you're saying no one uses it anyway as if that somehow makes it cool? That's a bit insulting.

>>28036
Though that anon is retarded, I think more oldfags use discord than you think. I think it's been mentioned before that a lot of oldfags move on to invite-only channels on whatever instant messaging service, like discord. Many a time I've been on an old forum from the late 90s - early 00s which for some reason now has a discord server. You can be an IRC elitist all you want, but you've gotta admit that discord is convenient.

>>28039
>you've gotta admit that discord is convenient
How? Because instead of posting links to images, you can post the images directly? Discord requires an email address, has global content rules, and you might get hassled about account security or whatever the fuck.

>>28039
I'm almost 35yo, I tried use Discord multiple time, stopped using that shit for good now because that "discord app" is just shameless spyware, and now, is explicit shameless spyware.
They change they privacy policies, now, they are 100% explicit about what they do with our data.

I will use IRC until the last day of my life.

>>26380
I'm 42, autistic. Remember watching Buffy the Vampire and wondering if that was normal life. Re watched it recently and enjoy it more and I'm more at peace with myself. I have a pet Kestrel which keeps me and is too long-lived for me to take myself out anytime soon. Blessed be honestly.

>>26694
I mean you must have been exposed to it by your aprents or whatever, I hated showing anything to my parents and only when I realised i could use headphones did i try anything other than video games

>>28636
Nice necro. I had older college-aged relatives who were into anime when I was a kid and I was always curious about it. My mother sometimes made mocking comments about them (liking those 'Chinese cartoons' or whatever), which made me self-conscious about liking it at that age. I could say more things about both of my parents, but I'll just mention that I wouldn't mind them dying even if it means I'd have to stop being a hiki and get a shitty job.

The realization that I'm now in my late 30s is hitting me hard. The awareness that it's probably too little too late is starting to sink in. I've always felt that I've walked the best possible paths I could in my life despite how things have turned but for the first time in my life that feeling is slowly giving way to a longing sense of regret for what could've been. I'm at a complete loss as to where to go from here, the desire for an end remains but the same cannot be said of the willpower to go through with it. I've never seen myself living to my 40s or 50s but the prospect of it is becoming very real and I'm struggling to reconcile with that reality.