BTW, if you didn't get the memo, this is a rant, so it's pretty inflamatory 8)
I don't know what it is about dolling that incites dollers to have such a hive mentality, but we do. Perhaps it stems from the me-too behavior that propagated the sk8r dollz on Palace so many years ago?
Here's a list of various bases that the entire community seemed to go ga-ga over.
The mass usage is definitely a good way to get chronicled in the dolling annals fairly concretely, but I remember ILCK expressed distaste on her site that people would still be using the old cora bases she wasn't happy with anymore. So I guess fame has its downsides as well
Of course, if everyone uses the same base, what happens when there are so many dolls on that base that you can no longer distinguish easily between them? The more a base seems to emanate a certain idea of what kind of doll should be made with it, surely the harder it would be to successfully doll something else on it. Thus you get a lot of dolls on the same base that all look the same, and if you had a good idea in mind that that particular base would be perfect for, you might be discouraged from using it because of the excessive amount of use it's had lately.
Hopefully you all can see that is a bad thing to have happen! If you don't want to use a base solely on the grounds that everyone else is, that stymies your creativity, which is prettymuch a state crime here in the realm of dolling.
It's not just bases though. The fads stem to all kinds of other things. When I first started dolling, there were people everywhere with dolls touting "Harmony in the Dolling Community" and the value of "Dolling Netiquette" and the horrors of "Frankendolling". Does that date me? I dunno.
The pixel shading fad (and it was a fad. Why else would people be so condescending just based on the way one shades?) kinda hit home for me. Suddenly there's a great big group of people declaring themselves superior to you because they choose to use a crippled program to make dolls or because they place one pixel at a time! Yeah um, there's a thing called flood fill. It keeps you from having to do that! Anyways, personal grudges aside(and I still do hold a grudge from that time, even if it was three years ago! I got het up like nothing else then.), when you feel that you need to change the way you do stuff in order to be paid attention to, that's bad.
Let me say that again.
That's Bad
Earlier we had people choosing to use or not use bases based on the hive mindset and now shading styles. Being influenced is one thing, but feeling you must do something to stay in the society is ridiculous. It takes us back to the stereotypical junior high years. Don't wear the right clothes or listen to the right music and hey, you're not our friend.
Of course the dolling community has already converted everyone to happy people who never argue, because we need harmony and peace! So they go about it a lot nicer, but you can tell if you don't get comments on a pretty dang good doll, but something that looks like a dozen others you've seen posted that day gets ten replies immediately. Maybe I'm bitter from that happening to me too many times, but it shouldn't.
Do you know how difficult it is to find a dolling forum that is active but doesn't have a fairy tale or faerie theme? Ever since the realm disappeared off the face of the earth, I've been looking and I haven't found much in the way of them. (If you've got a link you want to share, definitely e-mail me). That says to me that right now it's in to be pastelly happy fae or fairytale folk.
Maybe it's because I identified with it more, but man, what happened to the punk doll scene? The neon colors on sites with black backgrounds have been replaced by seafoam green and baby puke yellow. Come on guys, being the same is bad, remember?
It's one thing to have a fad once or twice, but one constantly all the time with no break? Maybe it's because I haven't paid attention the last couple of years, but there doesn't seem like there's been a break.
Perhaps it's time to break up the dolling community a little bit; ruffle some chicks' sensitivities; do something different.
Visitors here and people from fora I try to post at may know about my love for PNG; I try to bring it up a lot because people don't KNOW about it, and they should. I never used to think about how a contest rule like "NO JPEG or BMP files, just transparent GIF" could be bad. I mean, transparency is the epitome of dolling. You can't transparencize a jpeg or bitmap file. But you can a PNG!
I would hazard to guess that the majority of contests that stipulate "NO PNG" do it out of ignorance. And that's one of the simplest things that can be changed. Right now, a good chunk of the dolling community is ignorant of things going on around them on the internet or on their computers. Now, if you're not a computer nerd, that's okay. But if you're going to exist on the internet, you should at least know a little about it. If you were to go to paris and live and not care anything about art or the french language, then what would be the point? It's just a place to live and there's no point in living there over America. If you're born there, that may be one thing. But no one is born on the internet. We all choose to come here, so we had better have a good reason for choosing that.
A last example of sameness that illustrates my point about online ignorance is how common i-frame layouts are with dollers. If you call the rest of the web, you might learn that these fell out of favor a few years ago with the popular realization of CSS. Perhaps that labels CSS as a fad, but hey, it's a fad one step up over iframes.
This has been very ranty and is thus unorganized, so here, a quick recapitulation of my points:
And a disclaimer, because I don't want the dolling police coming after me and making me stitch the letter M on all my dolls for "Malcontent". These are my opinions, but you might find that more people than you'd imagine agree with them. Of course, if you're reading this, you should feel that you do agree with them! if not, then you're definitely someone that needs to read them 8)