i will be, it's not a crisis, but i just wanted to share that here. i want everyone to know that he was a good boy and i loved him and i love him still. he was born in 2007 so since before this website even existed and that's a godo and a long life for a dog and it was painless and last night i did a good job focusing on that but tonight i'm crying and i'ts hard. i love him so much and i still do. he was cute and he wasa a total mutt so he didn't lioook like anything he only looked like himself, and he was brown and he was good and he would howl sometimes and he knew a couple words of spanish and he had the cutest spotty feet.
i had him for before this site even existed let alone before i was on it. even before i watched survivor if you can believe it. so anyone who ever sees this blog even if you see it a while from now checkinge my profile like "I wonder if szim's sever logged in again" and you knew me waaaay back in the day, no matter how far back we go, i knew him longer than i've known you. that's how long he'sbeen around. he was good
when they check my profile days, weeks, months, years, etc. from now and see that they missed the great, short-lived return of Zim to this site because it happened around Christmas for some reason and they were all doing holiday things instead of checking in on Tengaged.
I mean, I might stick around a little for the next couple days, if only to Mail w/ people, but the interest is already waning pretty hard, so I won't be surprised if I just sign out for ages again instead. We'll see. I'm just going to write this under the supposition that it COULD be the last thing I post here for another 7-8 years, even though it totally might not be, too. But to anyone who I was on good terms with back in the day who sees this down the line, feel free to drop me a line via DMs, or if I haven't signed in in months leave a comment here or something cuz it seems DMs here delete after a certain amount of months or something. (So, if anyone has tried to reach me via Mail on here since 2014, sorry, I didn't see it. Try again!)
Summary of my return: I played a couple games, got voted out late in one of them, and got voted out tragically early in the others. I touched base with a few people I haven't interacted with in years and years, which is cool. I won an auction for this cool rainbowy hair, and I think I would have won another auction for other cool rainbowy hair if I hadn't been busy Christmassing with the family and thus forgotten about it, lol. I forgot just how much dope clothing I have for my avatar tbh it's really cool.
Summary of my thoughts on this site now, having briefly returned to it: It was interesting in a handful of ways, the majority of which actively disincentivize really returning here. Those ways are as follows:
First of all, it's absolutely fucking crazy how, despite having literally not posted a bloggot (isn't that what BengalBoy called them or something? Or Drench or something? What was the deal there?) in over seven years and having not played a game in over eight, it genuinely felt, upon getting back into the swing of blogging and playing, like I'd only been offline for four or five days. Getting back into the rhythm of checking my mentions on my profile, checking for new comments on my blogs, refreshing the games I'm in, etc. was virtually seamless and, like, hit pretty hard once I was back into it, which is just interesting.
I have to assume the reason here is that, given that I was on here basically constantly for like 5-6 years of my life -- during some relatively formative years in neurological development, too -- the neural pathways in my brain that know how to fall into that pattern of behavior of checking the blog, checking the mentions, and checking the game are pretty deeply entrenched - like, I imagine there are synapses or whatever in my brain that follow that exact rhythm and that are really, really well-established, and signing back in basically reactivated them again or something to where those same basic routines could start up again and FEEL just like it happened before. Idk, I'm not a neurologist, that shit actually kinda makes me existential tbh, but either way, the RESULT of signing back in for sure was falling back into those routines, which is interesting.
I guess another cause behind it is probably that, while I'm not on here anymore, it's not like I'm not still a screen-addicted millennial constantly on social media in general, since I am, so the basic pattern of checking for responses and checking for notifications, etc., is still behavior I do like every day; this site just forces you to go more out of your way to do it. Like lol it's genuinely sooo strikingly, with distance from spending more time here and being used to it, inefficient to check your "notifications" on here, given the lack of any actual notification feature. Having to go to your blog page and scroll down, even that "recent comments" section just randomly stops loading sometimes, and having to scroll down on your own user page... it forces a level of active effort and attention, compared to just getting pinged automatically when you have a new comment on your blog or new tag in someone else's, that's really sluggish and annoying. Maybe it keeps people on here longer who are on here regardless, though?, by keeping them checking for those things - but I bet it's still worse for user engagement overall since it probably makes back-and-forth exchanges less frequent. IDK. Either way, I'm sure randomize has absolutely none of those factors in mind and just hasn't added a notification feature because he has no reason to and so doesn't care, lol.
At any rate, that's definitely one reason for me to stay away, as I think I'm very, very susceptible to that brand of compulsive checking-for-replies, and spending all day on here was fine when I was a teenager who was too anxious and autistic (still autistic now, but diagnosed and understand it better) to have other forms of social interaction. This site definitely had its purpose at the time when I was most active on it (there honestly were a ton of high highs, and low lows, on here, and I doubt I'll ever have a singular answer to whether spending years of my life on here was, on balance, "good for me", which would itself be a super complex and interesting topic haha I mean we're talking about years and years of formative social development idk so there's a lot to unpack there.) But now, I've got other ways to interact with people, and I've got other, more important shit to do lol -- and other equally unimportant, but more gratifying, stuff that detracts me from it. I'm susceptible enough to time sinks as-is; I don't need another.
Even in the fasting I played, once it filled up, it kept me glued to my screen for longer than I wanted to, and I could feel some of the same listless "i'm just checking the same thing over and over" malaise that was, like, a ton of my life when I was younger lol, setting in. Which is a cool thing to revisit, since it makes me happy that I'm freer from that now, and that even though I still waste a lot of my time every day, I'm doing it in ways I broadly feel better about or get a little more out of. Usually. And wasting a couple hours out of a day when I was 16 didn't matter as much as doing it now.
That isn't to say the entire thing is cursed or anything. I just think this site's design lends itself towards spending more time here than necessary, and I'm at a point in my life where my free time is particularly valuable and needs to be used better than it already is, and I'm a person who is especially susceptible to getting sucked in by designs like that. And this just ain't a good time for the time sink.
As for the site itself: Genuinely surprised by how little has changed. New color levels are kind of fun to see I guess, I still remember when black was the elite one haha, I guess it makes sense that over the years and years even TV star would become common and they'd add more. One of them being unlocked by winning Stars is interesting I guess, I never really saw much appeal in that game even when I was more active on here, it's interesting to see it explicitly enshrined in color levels as a thing to aspire to.
The arbitrary capping of enrollment into certain games is baffling and terrible lol. I actually think that, despite concerns about the time sink, I would, without that cap/rotation/whatever, stick around and play some more fastings or frookies when I've gotten my tasks done for the day and want to blow off some steam, at least a LITTLE more than I will now, but as-is I'd have to wait hours and hours just for one to even open? That's... the antithesis of what a "fast" game is for, lol. No idea what rando is thinking there unless it's just to minimize server costs or if games were filling up too slowly before that was implemented due to a smaller userbase and this is meant to mask that fact. No other explanation would really make sense to me.
New logo is kinda ass. Those "g"s look terrible. The TV is fine but the rest is bad. I guess it has more personality than the old one, so I'd rather that than a logo that's super minimalist like most logos are now, like just a lowercase "t" or something. So actually I guess I respect it. It looks bad and weird and is a baffling font choice but at least it's got personality. I've come around. The new logo sucks but I like what it's going for. Lol.
Other than that, I'm mostly surprised by how little has changed? In particular, the Casting format is virtually identical to what I remember it as being before I left. I'm sure there are subtle changes I'm missing, but around 2009-2012 or thereabouts, idk the exact chronology, but I remember the Casting format changing A LOT to different permutations of having keys/apples/competitions/etc., until eventually a format was settled on that seemed to work out pretty well, weed out inactives in a fluid way, and capture the best of all the different elements. But with just how many random, unannounced changes to Castings there were back in the day, I'm surprised, even though the ultimate format we got is pretty good, that it's lasted THIS long. I'm sure it has some subtle changes I didn't pick up on. The single row of avatars is interesting, I don't have a huge opinion on it, it's neat how when you mouse over someone their avatar gets all big tho.
But yeah, other than these things, most things are the same. New competitions but that's inevitable w/ the demise of Flash and so has little to do w/ this site itself. Find Me and the Sum game seemed kinda fun and interesting. They were fine. I probably liked the old ones a bit better, but without Flash, it's hard, so I'm just glad rando or whoever managed to create something new.
As for the community: It's clearly smaller than it used to be, although larger than when I glanced at this site without logging in once or twice over the years and saw top blogs with double-digit numbers of points lol. I genuinely thought the site would probably be down by now cuz it was really circling the drain then, but I guess it's picked up a bit since whenever I was seeing blogs in the 90s make it to the top. Still nowhere near the level it was at before, though; the pretty attainable number of points it still takes even now to get into the top blogs partially indicates that, but what indicates that even more is the absolutely massive crossover I saw between who was in Stars, each of the games I played, and the blogs page. It was drawing from a really small subset of people, like across just those three games and the blogs page I've already seen a ton of names and faces multiple times, and same with in the comments section. That's not intrinsically bad or anything, it's just interesting how much noticeably smaller it is. I'm not surprised it's smaller, but it's still just interesting to look at the blogs page and be guaranteed, on multiple instances, to see the exact same people who are in your game, then look at Stars and see those same ones, too.
I think I expected -- somehow, lmao -- for the community to be, like... more mature than it was when I left here? Like for a lot of the dramatic people of the past to be in their upper 20s or in their 30s by now and look back on Tengaged of yore as a wacky time and to now find this to be a still occasionally catty, but much chiller, more woke, and kinda mature sphere for reality TV discourse. Alternatively, I might have expected it to be a lot WORSE, since I do think it got more and more toxic up through around the time when I left, and from my glances at the blog page after that, so I would have maybe expected it to circle the drain and just be an absolutely ungodly cesspool of people seriously ripping into each other.
But it's... kind of neither? It's DEFINITELY not the former, lol (which is unfortunate as I'd prob stick around longer if that were the case.) But on the plus side, it's not the latter, either!, at least from what I saw. Instead, it just... feels like... kind of the same level of pettiness and dumb, unnecessarily ~dramatic~ posts that it would have been ages ago? no better and no worse. Which is honestly kind of surreal haha it's like being put in a time machine back into the early-mid 2010s with surprisingly little having changed - and honestly, that's kinda a nostalgic enough enterprise that, in theory, it might keep me around longer, if not for two factors:
a.) The aforementioned time sink; and:
b.) The fact that I don't really recognize almost anyone here, lol.
Which is my last observation (just b/c it's the last one I'm getting around to, not for any particular reason) about my time here, and is a pretty obvious one. There are like people all over the blogs page with TV Star or higher who I see blogs about that have apparently played Stars a ton and I'm just like the "who are you people" spongebob meme, I have no idea who these people are. Any time I even recognize a username it's like "Oh hey, neat!" even though in almost all of those instances it's someone I don't remember knowing particularly well, lol.
That's not a bad thing or anything, and it's also unsurprising with how long I've been gone. But it just further makes it not worth the time sink to stick around, when the intrinsic vibe of the community is something I no longer gravitate towards as much since I'm not 15, and the people comprising it aren't nostalgic names for me to run into and are a small enough subset that I'm already kind of seeing the same names over and over.
So, yeah, idk. That's my review of the, like, couple hours I've spent on the site recently. I'll probably keep Mailing with the small few people I have been, I won't be surprised if I join another Fastings in a few months or something, but I definitely don't need this to be too much of a time sink, so I'll probably slink back into the ether now.
