Continued from this thread: http://www.hidden-street.net/forum/t...811#post896811

The problem with implying things is that you can imply things without meaning to. Sure, you didn't "explicitly" say anything that might constitute a personal attack, but it hardly means you didn't imply it. By this logic every single book in the world has no meaning and there is nothing to be learned from books, and thus drawing concrete conclusions from a text is illogical and flawed, because 'the author didn't actually say that'.

As an English major, whose job as a student is to find meaning in pretty much every thing I read, it's incredibly easy for me to read a text, online or in print, and immediately get a sense of the tone and logic behind said text. This isn't restricted to books and/or long articles, it's pretty easy to see that every post Wyatt makes is a(n attempt at a) personal attack against me "not having a life," which is somewhat funny, because he posts in threads unrelated to him in order to side against me; amusing and somewhat cute in a "aww, you're just a little kid" kind of way, but not really contributing to said threads. His primary reason for me "not having a life" is my spending money on NX, which he apparently takes offense to (though I have no clue as to why, I might venture out here and suggest that he himself has rarely had access to it and is simply jealous). Additionally, if it was unclear, the thread bltching about not having enough NX in Empty House was a joke. Yes, I make jokes occasionally.

The even more "interesting" thing is the idea that others apparently can't read texts for their life. If anything is posted in a moderately criticizing way to more than one person on this forum people tend to go a little insane and stop reading and immediately write up an angry, testosterone driven post. The point of my post in that thread was that, in that particular subforum, people were complimenting poor/lazy work as a way of gathering "karma", so to speak, or brownie points with others. My intention in that post was to explicate that brownie points don't help anyone except your ego and it would be better off if you didn't compliment the work and instead didn't post jack-squat. That's not to say that people should stop posting in that subforum altogether, I'm un-subtly suggesting that people should criticize others' work in an honest manner that may hurt the OP, but also help them improve. By simply saying "that looks good" without actually meaning it, you give them a false sense of skill and self accomplishment. Additionally, complimenting good work is great, but again, saying "that looks good" doesn't help the OP improve or understand what they did well and what they did poorly. Even throwing in a " I like the colours on this one" or "you did x and y well" serves to greatly help anyone starting up anything.

tl;dr - "I DIDNT SAY IT SO YOU'RE DRAWING IMPLICATIONS WHERE THEY DON'T EXIST"
Honesty > compliments