I dont see 'January' in the thread title.
I'm a little upset that so many people just switched back. The OP goes on about what it acheived and what it stood for and most everybody just completely ditched it, going back to the same obnoxious internet anonymity that plagues the web every minute of every day, which I thought was half the point of Real Pic.
Just disappointed, thats all. I'll be keeping my REAL pic. A drawing is not a real pic, by the way. It acheives no sympathetic link that humans are drawn to.
I'm glad that its created some mini-community here, but I feel the actual meaning is being lost very quickly and that a worthy movement has been crushed simply due to a naming problem, leading people to think it could only happen for a small time period and couldn't be a widespread, permanent thing.
Oh well. Anyways, have a good night and a good Valentine's Day tomorrow everybody. Cheers.
Greetings Seanspeed! I just wanted to address this, for your despair affected me personaly, causing sadness spasms and all kinds of other ill-effects.
1. You may not see January in this thread title, but I assure you that the OT and OT2 (which I happened to be the one making) clearly addressed "Real Pic January." As January drew to a close (this part you'll like!) several posters in the thread expressed a desire to continue using their real pics after the month, including me.
2. When the thread was moved to Community, someone else renamed it "RealPic: A GAF Community!" relinquishing all references to January for better or worse- but there's no rewriting history, that's the way it was always planned.
3. Turns out, plans for a "letter February" where people's avatars are replaced in some way with the first letter of their usernames, attracted a bunch of RP GAF over and many were starting before Feb even began. I didn't like this idea as much because, like your problem with what's going on in this thread, the letters are very impersonal. In a sort of natural reaction to that movement, our very own Tence started drawing us all these MSPaint renditions of whatever Real Pic we happened to be using at the time. Many of us decided to run with these as our avatars for the month of February. This I enjoy quite a bit, as I can still recognize quite a few posters simply by their avatars, especially when I knew the Real Pic each was based on!
4. There has been a bit of talk of switching back to real pics across the board for March, but nothing set in stone. Maybe you can be the one to motivate us and lead the charge for "RealPic: The Return!" or something!
5. The "worthy movement being crushed" bit is a little ironic. Funnily enough being moved to community has done more than anything else to slow the participation and activity in
this community. But conventional wisdom said that the thread would just be closed at the end of the month and people would just switch back or not haphazardly over the course of the next few weeks with no organization or any unifying thread. So here at least we have a place to coordinate future Real Pic activities and don't have to sacrifice the ties that were made during the experience. So chin up!
Like I said, just a disappointment, thats all. If all y'all wanted was some place to talk about some stupid bullshit, chatrooms have done all that and more in the past. Just please stop calling this 'RealPic': A community!' when its that anymore at all. Its just a glorified chatroom.
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While I certainly understand your disappointment, I can't particularly sympathize with your attitude here. Again, we didn't name this thread, nor did the original concept imply anything other than a specific event for the month of January. The fact that the concept has gone beyond the month of January and is willing to be revisited by any is a
good thing.
Calling this thread a "glorified chatroom" is a bit of a sore spot for me... if you had happened to be following events in the main threads toward the end of January, you'd have seen a lot of discussion of what would happen to the community as the month ended and the thread was locked (as was assumed to be the case). A chatroom was one of many suggestions, and we do have a fun RPGaf chatroom to take part in, but myriad differences between a thread of this nature on a forum and a chatroom were voiced by a number of active participants in here.
I hope that you stick around and hang out in here a bit. I'm sure you will be able to convince some of us to switch back to real avatars sooner rather than later.
I haven't been following this thread, so I hope you're right. A gimmick is fine, so long as we retain our real identity somewhere in there.
I assure you that that's been discussed. Also, while you may not be able to see our real faces, our real
identities are definitely a part of these paint avatars.
Finally, 4chan figured out our diabolical scheme wrought by EviLore to make the forum at large seem like less of a propaganda machine and more like a place composed of real people, so it's a good idea for us to switch it up a little to throw them off the scent.