YES!My financial situation recently changed for the better, and I no longer need the money coming in from subscribers in order to finance the site. The books are paying for themselves, as I recently noted [ > ], and at the same time I have finally found a way to have an essentially unlimited number of contributors without having to pay them anything, or even to so much as communicate with them at all (I will explain all in an upcoming article in detail).
I have been considering this move for a while, as my finances have been improving dramatically over the past few months, but what made me pull the trigger specifically today was the publication of the English translation of Recap's editorial, The New Technocrats. It's such a magnificent piece of writing that it made me want to shout it from the rooftops, so to speak. It is a tour-de-force, an awe-inspiring demonstration of the difference between passion and fagotry (for everyone who likes portable formats is a fagot).
And then the recent "Gamergate" hoopla, and all the new sites that are popping up to cover the perceived "void" (which as I've already explained [ > ] doesn't really exist, because Insomnia has been filling it since 2005) made me want to step it up, by investing even more of my time and money than I already have these past 10 or so years, to take the site "Mane Streem", so to speak, if you get my meaning. It really is Insomnia's time to fully shine and assume its place as the Cahiers du Cinéma or the New Yorker of videogames, since there do not really exist any other videogame sites today (as I will be explaining in Videogame Culture: Volume II eventually). If you look closely enough you'll realize that no one else is talking about videogames at all anymore.
Other things happening is that I will be devolving moderation of the forum to other people, so that the banhammer will not be coming down as swiftly and definitively as before. We'll try 1-week and 1-month bans, etc., when we need to, in order to help people become acclimatized with the nature of an intellectual forum as opposed to a gutter where every retard is allowed to speak his mind without thinking or even reading what has been been said before on the subject that he is replying to. At the same time I will be relying on long-time forum members to explain stuff patiently and nicely to new members, so that the majority of potential bans can be prevented ahead of time.
So the forum is already fully viewable by guests (except the Trading forum, which will always require membership), and whoever wants to register an account, in order to be able to post, should email Qpo at qpo@culture.vg with his two preferred usernames, and he'll set you up -- there is no fee required for it. The only thing we ask is that you use a REAL email address, not one of those fake, throwaway ones that people use like Mailinator. If you employ a site like that, we will not reply to your request for an account.
If you already have an account in the forum, please don't try to register a new one. All previous bans are anyway off, and no one is holding a grudge here. As long as you can behave yourself FROM NOW ON, you are welcome to use your old account and post here, even if you are the kid that hacked this site all those years ago. So if you are an old user and want your old account reactivated, email Qpo and he'll do it for you. It's no big deal. Eventually, I might try automatically reactivating all the old accounts, but there are some technical issues that prevent me from doing this right now, so until then Qpo will have to do it manually when it is requested of him.
As for the frontpage: most of the latest articles are now publicly viewable, but not all, and definitely not any of the older ones. The problem is that making all the articles viewable is not just a matter of pressing a button in the CMS I am using: I have to go to each individual article page and re-save it as "publicly viewable", which takes some time. If I spent an entire day doing this I could have the whole site visible within 24 hours, but it is a dreadfully boring job and I can't stomach more than a few minutes of it a time. So you'll just have to wait a week or two until I get around to making everything visible.
Finally, I will soon be expanding all the above into an article titled "Insomnia is About to Explode", so hold off any questions you might have on the subject until that article goes up, and make sure to read it carefully when it does because it will contain a ton of new material that is not included in this forum post. This post is merely a little preview of what is coming, to give a headstart to those who are wondering why the fuck they can suddenly view stuff that they couldn't have before.
Glorious times ahead of us brothers and sisters!
