Friday Q&A

Questionable Prediction

Greetings, crickets and trolls. Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Q&A. Each week, I focus on the issues that matter to Fark's Photoshop community. Issues like half-remembered gossip and my own petty personal squabbles, mixed in with empty speculation. I try to make sure each post contains pure facts, or at least pure fact-like content.

Q: When is Fark going to die?

A: Fark's demise has been incorrectly forecast several times in the past decade. Not to make light of any doomsayers or the prophecies they've foretold, but their prediction success rate seems to be about zero. The faces might change, but the contests never do. You can talk about people's interest declining all you want, but as long as there exists a picture a a black guy standing anywhere near water, people will want to put a Beer Looter in there. As long as there exists a picture of a guy with a face, someone will want to turn him into the Paint Huffer. Deride cliches all you want, but perpetuating their existence serves to safeguard our own. It can't all be high concept art.

Q: But what about the high concept art?

A: Just as there will always exist visual memes and cliches, there will always be those who aspire to be something greater. It's the nature of competition. Cliches will always exist, but Fark is a great playground to expand one's skill. How many cliche users have gone on to become veteran PSers, themselves bemoaning the cliche abuse "ruining" their community? I don't know the actual percentage, but I'm sure it's hilariously high.

Q: Why are we going over this again?

A: Good question. I'm sure I've made a dozen or so posts by now expounding on the same concept. It's a topic of conversation that surfaces occasionally in the PSAEF. If you keeps things in perspective, you'll understand that what we do isn't going to stop any time soon. We hang out at a forum wherein people communicate with each other by sharing humorous images. There will always be a demand for the creation of these images. The cutting edge may have moved on to video and animation, but the basic structure of the Internet still favors the transmission of pictures over video.

That's all for this time, gentle reader. Thanks again for stopping by. Fark has been fending off predictions of impending doom for years. In that time, my opinion has remained steadfast: the "crap and cliches" that so many rail against are actually the life blood of our community. If anything, they make the non-crappy stuff look even better.

Stay tuned for more relative quality from the Doctor!