This seems like such a silly thing to bring up after so long, but this discussion on simsecret from last week kinda got me thinking about a few things. (I'm bringing it up here, now, because I didn't see it until tonight, and thought any comment I made on it would get lost seeing as it was made by several Anons.) I'm not usually one to express my opinions (why the hell should anyone care about mine when, at the end of the day, it's generally no more or less important than yours?), but this is something that hits a little closer to home, so I'll make an exception. I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but just in case...

The truth is, Gelydh and I stayed at TSR longer because of shit like that going on around 'the community.' Why would we want to leave the safe haven of TSR, where we had people we considered our friends giving us a network of support, when on the 'outside,' people wouldn't think twice about saying our creations were 'shit,' that we were bitches, psychos, any number of stupid things just because we were FAs at TSR, based on shit that some psychotic bitch decided to say about us just because I dared remove her from my LJ friends list? A huge part of why I even went to TSR in the first place is because of things that were said about me on PMBD even before I was a pay creator; TSR seemed something outside of everything else, a place where it was quiet if nothing else.

When all is said and done, we only stayed there as long as we did because of the (perceived or otherwise) hostility of people on PMBD. Our SOP was to try to ignore PMBD as much as possible, and try to focus on making stuff and trying to have fun while we were doing it. We never saw anything positive about us there, not least of which because it was buried under all the bad stuff. Even if it wasn't anything negative about us personally, why would we want to risk running into something by going there?

When people said shit about us on GoS, we honestly didn't see it until either just before or just after we'd gone free, as we'd only really stumbled on the site a few weeks before we'd made the decision to leave. What was a huge help to us was running into Liegenschonheit, who went out of her way to make it known that, pay or free, we were more than welcome to hang out on her forum. That was a huge deal, because, until that point, no one had bothered contacting us directly to say this.

At the end of the day, we left TSR because of our own disgust of the way things were being run there, not because of anything anyone on PMBD had to say about it. I, personally, felt used and lied to; two things I have zero tolerance for.

We don't at all regret going free, most of all because doing so has allowed us to represent ourselves rather than a larger entity. If we had it all to do over again, we wouldn't change a thing.

For what it's worth, I'm completely with anon#2 on this one: "I still like my content free, don't support TSR or Thoma$$, but I can't back PMBD. No way, no how." Good thing we were never really all that involved on PMBD, especially given how quick certain members were to turn on us over the most mind-numbingly minor things (forgetting about a thread from almost a year earlier, for example).

I need a better ending. Pretend there was something profound here.