Good luck, we could use another no-crit pub out there for old people like me that can't cut it in the world of comp. Hopefully you get a strong community behind it so that it doesn't have trouble populating on a daily basis.

I was just trying to make sure I heard right because 8-9 seemed really tall for a single sheet of paper. Considering you'd need a minimum width per strip if you cut it lengthwise, and each strip could be 11 inches at most.

5-6 seemed more realistic.

Wait, you're aiming for 8-9 feet off a single sheet of A4 paper? I'm assuming you're gonna try to cut the paper lengthwise?

Are you allowed the paste that would be required in paper mache?

Okay that was harsh. But that's not an angry face.

Do you suffer from Social-Emotional Agnosia?

Or have you just never seen an Asian person's face before?

PS: If anything she looks smug.

*Oscars runner-up applause*

This is precisely why I got so heated in this thread. You're convinced people are just looking to be seen as victims. All you need to do is look at this forum. We all share a common hobby/passion, and I don't know that anybody here is specifically asking to be seen as a victim. In fact the first post in the thread is just a guy remembering family he lost and asking for some remembrance as well. I don't think anybody in the thread has even requested victim-status. All that venting is misdirected. It's VERY likely that the majority of Americans on this forum would agree that pushing the victim angle is mostly only adopted by unscrupulous types now. Pointing fingers in so general a way as constantly referring to America as a homogeneous whole that, as a group decided unanimously to be victims is the biggest problem here.

It's a nation, not a singular organism. There's people inside.

Do you honestly not see the flaw in this statement? "No qualms" is a bit of stretch. I have no doubt those involved probably understood the magnitude of what they'd done, and carried it with them to the end of their days.

Second, it seems weird that you're fixated on equating a national identity with that of the nation several decades ago. Generationally speaking the people making up the United States now do not comprise the people making up the United States in the 1940s by any significant amount, especially if you think about who was making foreign policy at that point.

Do you blame the Japanese today for the atrocities that were inflicted upon the Chinese? Do you blame any number of countries for the forced enslavement of huge swaths of people? Is the nation of Cambodia somehow still liable for the Killing Fields?

I mean if you're fixated on equating the past crimes of a nation with their modern day incarnation, and you're deadset on adopting that as your viewpoint, then I suppose there really is no way to discuss this rationally.

Given that the average age of TF2 players appears to be less than 25, it seems unlikely that anybody would have been personally affected by the bombings. Given that the playerbase that frequents these forums is largely North American, it stands to reason that there might be more than one person here who lost somebody in the attacks.

Why not post and talk about it, and see if anybody else has had similar experiences, especially in an off-topic forum?

The whole point is that we have moved on though. You're acting like proportionally the number of people who ask for remembrance is extremely high when in fact it's probably tiny at this point. I think as a nation we recovered many years ago from it. The event itself hasn't significantly crippled us in any way. Few people will mention it throughout the year, and even then a large number of those (relatively few) mentions are probably shitty jokes like Mewtwo told. It's actually wholly pointless to tell people to move on. People like you or me, who didn't have any personal stake in the matter, already don't give enough of a shit 364 days of the year to think about it. People who have lost loved ones will probably never just spend the day in a completely ordinary fashion without at least once reflecting on their loss. And assholes seeking to use 9/11 for personal profit are going to be assholes.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish by A: telling us to move on and B: drawing a weird analogy to a breakup?

Anyway, there are many other nations that hold remembrance events for disasters or tragedies.

Man I'm sorry, I really am. I knew in my head that I shouldn't argue on the internet instead of going to bed but my heart screamed that idiocy had to be met with reason. Obviously my heart was in the wrong here.

The janitor working the middle 20 floors probably planned some warcrimes for lunch and then murdered innocent people in another country in the name of Being American.

Edit: Okay the above is clearly too sarcastic. I apologize. It's far too late for me to be awake.

I think what happened was he made what was originally an off-hand comment or not particularly heated. When people started challenging him, he began to get more defensive and aggressive in defending his stance.

Okay, a few points.

First of all, I don't understand why you insist on using butthurt as an adjective to describe any of us when you are clearly one of the most defensive and least insightful people I have ever known.

Second, I spent what I would consider my formative years outside of the United States, and while my citizenship and residence is of this country, I would hardly call myself a patriot, and just barely an American culturally. My concern isn't with identifying people by a country of origin or tagging them as "Americans" vs "Others", my concern here was that you were taking so many human (human, whether they're from the states or from another country) elements out of this equation, and instead focusing on something as petty as an "us vs. them" mentality.

There is certainly a degree of cognitive dissonance going on here. I again urge you not to lump all Americans together or focus only on the loudest majority of them though. I think it's wholly possible to understand that some people join the military with the intention of defending one's country, and that service can be a very difficult experience both physically and emotionally, while also understanding that the military's movements are largely dictated by politics. There's a lot of things that people should answer for and never will.