I think my user account dates back to late 1998, though I might have read the site for a while before finally registering. There never really was a Golden Age of Slashdot, when all the stories were relevant, the summaries were factual (and properly edited), and the submissions were timely. It's pretty much always been the same as today, though the summaries sometimes do seem a bit more trollish these days. Of course, that's probably the fault of the submitters.

If you go back and read the journal entries and comments from the early days, you'll see that people had much the same concerns back then that they have today: dupes, poor editing of the submissions, flamebait articles, inaccurate summaries, more dupes, and Jon Katz. It's difficult to state how much Jon Katz was hated and reviled. In fact, now that I have no one to focus my Two Minutes Hate on any more, I do feel a bit empty.

I really should have thought about that before I made my post, because you've definitely got a point. However, as disturbing as that scenario is, it hasn't been done explicitly for entertainment purposes. It also lacks the crass commercialization of a Hollywood movie, with the requisite viral marketing and merchandising tie-ins. Just think: little toy mushroom clouds for the kids! There's some real potential here for a producer with vision.

I don't know about you, but I'm kind of excited about the thought of a small third world nation having a nuclear bomb dropped on it, so that I can be entertained. I'm not heartless. The people would be evacuated first, of course. All of this would be captured by an award-winning director (I'm gunning for James Cameron), who would be free to add some drama and story to the action. If we find a poor enough nation, we should be able to pull this off for around a billion US dollars. Seeing as how Cameron has proved that he can pull in a billion dollars already, this should be doable.

I say, if we're going to be decadent, it's time to go all the way.

Yeah, maybe the true story here is that someone actually thought their local government wasn't a fascist dictatorship.

I agree. I think we need a mechanism for citizens to sue their representatives for treasonous legislation. The problem, of course, is that uncompromising ideologues will clog the court system with such protests. I'm sure there's a working solution, but it probably wouldn't be easy to implement. Anyways, it's probably idealistic and naive to expect that it would even accomplish anything, even if it did get implemented.

The part that confuses me is that I got modded up.

The disturbing thing is that someone out there agrees with me, but only when I phrase it in the most trollish and asshole-ish way possible. Whoever you are, I appreciate your moderation points, but you need to take a step back and think about whether you've made the right decisions in your life. You're modding up an overt troll made by a bipolar poster who's off his medication and thinks it's hilariously funny to flame people on Slashdot. If you're OK with this, then I'm OK with it, too. But you need to think long and hard about this.

Are you kidding? xkcd is total shit. Let me sum it up for you: whimsical stick figures white knighting on the internet!!!!! But with pop culture references!!!!! LOLOLOLOL. Penny Arcade is better, but the blogs are frequently better than the actual strips. PhD comics is alright, but it's not exactly what I'd call great.

Let me introduce you to a real webcomic: The Parking Lot is Full.

Honorable mention to Gone with the Blastwave, Sexy Losers, and Perry Bible Fellowship, even though PBF is a pretty much a ripoff of PLIF. Still, it ripped off the best, so it gets an honorable mention.

If you're into insipid, warmed-over Monty Python references and "internet culture", then SMBC is probably what you're looking for. It's alright. It's shitloads better than xkcd, at least. And there's no desperate, low self-esteem white-knighting, which is a huge bonus. There's also Bob the Angry Flower, if you crave nerd humor that's got more substance than someone making fucking graphs.

I could mention a few others, but I was never that big a fan of Ghastly's Ghastly Comic (maybe you need to be a weeaboo to really love tentacle rape jokes... and Sexy Losers did it all first). There's also Subnormality, if you don't mind preachy, TL;DR strips about the totally wacky and off-the-wall adventures of a sphinx that -- get this -- likes to EAT PEOPLE!!!! LOL. What craziness!

But, really, xkcd is total shit.

There's always some scandal that's got Slashdot frothing at the mouth. We do so love our Two Minutes Hate.

To be fair, I suppose any community of rabid fanboys has the potential to devolve into a cult-like atmosphere. God knows the Amiga was pretty close to that, for a while, and I loved the Amiga. Anyways, I've owned a Mac or two in the past, and I'm not morally opposed to owning another one; the community was a bit freaky, however.

Doom has a certain stigma attached to it, especially when depressed, alienated teens obsessively play it...

If you talk to a real-life sociopath, you'll actually hear this from them, sometimes.

In a normal personal, the psychological gymnastics necessary to rationalize your behavior in this way would be truly amazing. In sociopaths, it seems to come naturally.