Forums.

SJ Games has announced their new, free web fora. I'm one of the moderators of the "other SJ Games RPGs" forum. Hopefully this will incline me to actually populate the forum, because in general, I hate web fora. Hate hate hate.

Mailing lists? Fine. NNTP discussion groups? Fine. Web boards? Hate 'em.

I'm not 100% sure why this is. I kind of wish I were, because then I'd be able to feel like this was a rational dislike. I think at least part of it is that MLs and newsgroups are so automatic; I can tell the email or news client to download everything new from all the groups I'm subscribed to, walk away, and come back later and read them. With web boards I have to ferret out the new posts, and it bugs me.

There are probably options I can change in the boards that'll make that easier. I haven't bothered to find out, because I'm on dial-up, and having to wait until the damn page loads before I can change anything, and then having to wait until that page loads to find out what it really changed: this pisses me off.

So here's hoping that mandatory long-term exposure changes my mind, because at the moment I'm looking at the forums and thinking "these aren't newsgroups why?".

*boggle*

Have been browsing the SJ Games forums for an hour or two now (it'd be longer, but I have to subtract load times; stupid dial-up), and what bothers me most of all is the people quietly not-quite-complaining about the administrators' decision to abolish the little animated-gif smileys that plague bulletin boards across the web.

"*smile urgently needed*" at the end of a post, or "(We really need smileys in here...)". (Both of these from the thread I'm currently browsing - Kromm's "I am like football." thread, in the Personalities forum.)

Do these people honestly not grasp the concept of the text "emoticon" - :), ;>, 8-(, etc? Are they really so reliant on what is, to me, one of the most abhorrent things to come out of the World Wide Web?

Gripe, gripe, gripe. Maybe I shouldn't be using these fora - I apparently just don't have the right mindset for it. I really do try not to be a curmudgeon most of the time.

I am currently

strongly considering saying "screw it" and letting my parents arrive to a messy house, because at least that way I know they'll have something to get bitchy about. As it is, my thoughts when I'm cleaning are full of my parents nitpicking the way the house looks even though I've cleaned it to the best of my ability, and I really don't need that kind of stress on top of all the rest of my current stress.

(The worst part of the above is that I'm never actually going to do that. I'll work until it's done, even if it means I'm up until midnight - which it won't, since despite the long list of rooms I have to clean, for the most part, all I really have to do is sweep the floor. The big mess is the dining room, and that's because all of the mail piles up there.)

(Still, the fear that my parents are going to walk in the door tomorrow and, regardless of how much cleaning I've done, find something to complain about is almost overwhelming me.)