Well here I am, another new arrival and I guess one of the rare few himbo’s around. I think I joined roundabout the end of March and was amazed at the sheer volume of possible items on display, years upon years of hard, and I’ve heard, volunteer work done by underappreciated diligent and skillful people who fell in love with the dress up part as well, but have a bit more of a creative capacity for it than I do.
I think the dress-up part of the site is unparalleled. Combine that with the community leaving wonderfully positive comments on each other’s looks and fashion sense, and you have got quite the genie in a bottle. I love the community coming together for contests, each sharing their own vision and spin on the prompt. Pure creativity at play. There should be more focus put on that.
But the longer you are here, the more the political larping side of the site shows itself. There’s some things I personally think are dumb, like the state ministers being forced to cough up imaginary money out of their own pockets, rather than every term and state having an allocated budget for these things (seriously how hard is it to write a couple lines on the backend to print that imaginary money to promote an active participating community). I guess it does fall in line with the entire thing of fashion designers not even receiving a share of their own work. Clearly that the community that’s here has managed to form despite all these rather predatory practices has been more of a fortuitous fluke than due to good management.
And still, in the grand scheme of things, these are small things compared to the joy of creatively putting together a look out of thousands upon thousands of options. They say there are more chess moves than there are stars in the galaxy, I am sure that’s nothing compared to the possible amount of dressup doll combinations. It is very easy to focus on the good and ignore the bad.
But then a couple days ago a pop-up shows up. An election reminder with just three accounts on the ballot. I could choose between ‘I am running’ and ‘I am also running’. The page after that had just a single option of a level 1 account rambling about something of a Palestina flag rather than offering some thoughts on the fashion state of things. Not many good picks, but then again we are marketed as a bimboland. So I do a bit of digging, come here, find out they are actually all alts of the same account and everyone else has been magically barred from participating by some magic bug.
Man, if this is some supposed online internet free republic LARP rather than a dressup site, the state of democracy here is even worse than in the supposed Federal Republic of Russia. At least over there you might be lucky and have the option to pick between Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, rather than just Putin and Putin’s stunt double in a different suit. But I guess this equivalence does explain the overall mood of paranoia and fear of getting banned or put in kiddie timeout that pervades the place.
Personally I think these magically appearing bugs that only seem to appear around the election period are an even weaker pretext than the Chechen apartment bombings, and the current excuse of there being some invisible deadline ever weirder. So you’re telling me not just Eunice but EVERYONE apart from Katherine all put in their forms in the very last hours? That this bug in the system was unknown to people who spent years on a site that has been relatively untouched and currently has no active development going on? Nothing personal, but I don’t buy it for a bit. Neither do I buy it that a simple re-election is functionally impossible and we’re stuck with what we have.
Anyway, congratulations on the successful coup of power. The thing with internet communities compared to real countries, though, is that you can’t close the borders to stop people from emigrating. I hope you'll keep that in mind before you’ll go full Caligula. I guess I’ll just stick to simple dress-up for the foreseeable future.
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