For a long time now I've felt like a living contradiction.  Everything I used to think about myself has been inverted, and everything I currently think about myself include both ends of the spectrum.  Brilliance and idiocy, joyful and sorrowful, sincere and flippant, superior and inferior.  There have been some constants, but those appear to be dying.

The latest to fall is probably for the best.  I've played up my own negativity on things, as I do tend to focus on what the problems are.  I think it plays into programming, as handling exceptions is necessary, so picking apart the little things is part of the job.  But in a general sense, I'm so sick of the negativity.

It's one of the best things we had going for us for a long time here -- the criticisms may have been legitimate when we had them, but they were in good humour.  Yet, nowhere's perfect; here and moreso the Internet at large is creating a great big bastion of hate.  I'll mention up-front that I'm not referring to factual matters; those who, for example, rally against vaccination are doing enormous harm and deserve to be vehemently shot down.  It's the realm of significant subjectivity.  It doesn't have to be videogames and it doesn't have to be personal; any area where there's room for reasonable disagreement, there are plenty to take it as an absolutist position.

If there's a criticism, it's not enough to just bring it up in the appropriate context, or if as a reaction, to expand on it.   With anything and everything, there are some to try to ruin it for everyone else.  It also gets worse, as it does spread to personal attacks by relation.  Those who support X are amateurish, or any number of other insults for no other reason than a difference of opinion.

So I'm done.  Keep it to yourselves, I don't want it destroying me from the inside out.  If you want to berate people for playing "casual" games, or PHP developers as not real programmers, or country music fans as hicks or any other selfish, outwardly hateful, spiteful and utterly immature positions, that's your prerogative, but you're not going to ruin it for the rest of us.  You're not going to ruin it for me.