Are things slower around here?

[Sketchasaurus]

I tend to use the two terms interchangeably since there are people who don't know what "sprites" are aside from the beverage.

I think an important part of having an active community is having people want to be a part of it while also feeling that they can. I'm in that awkward position where I've been here for quite some time, but I've never been a particularly active poster until fairly recently and even then I kind of feel like I'm overstepping boundaries at times (though this could just be because I don't want to impose on anyone in general) I mean, I've seen that there is a tightly-knit friendship between a bunch of the regulars around here, and that's awesome to see, but I think it's discouraging for some newcomers who don't have the same connections.

Although, it's not necessarily something unheard of in social groups anyways; this kind of thing is a normal part of any group of people and it takes effort on both sides of the situation for someone to be accepted. tVGR is a lot more accepting of a community than others.

I think the idea of making fan content is starting to decline, or at least the acceptance of it is: everybody is seemingly less inclined to indulge fan-game endeavors and be geared towards producing and encouraging more original content (at least, this is probably my bias since that's largely what grabs my attention) and I think part of it is because most of the regulars here have had time to grow and mature as artists/people/etc. I think it was more active in earlier years because everyone was still growing and trying to figure stuff out in general, and spriting was still a newly discovered artform without very many defined rules. Now we have commonly used terms and methods for making sprites that I didn't know existed back when I was making crappy Digimon edits back in the day.