[Raion]

This is going to be a little bit of a rant post and I apologize for everybody who doesn't want to read this type of shit. Unfortunately for me I'm the one who has constantly be dealing with this and I would like to vent my frustrations in a constructive manner. 

TL;DR: the N64 dev/decomp team has always consulted me on various aspects of IRIX IDO (pre 7.2 MIPSPro). I feel however that they are wholly uninterested in contributing back to our community, participating or offering solutions to ours issues, and as I've aged and become much wiser, I sometimes feel as if I'm being used. 

The community of N64 dev/decomp people mostly consists of young millennials and zoomers, I can't call them "kids" anymore as most are grown men, but they seem to have no appetite for forums, or the fact they are searchable, open source and not a hive of toxic discussion (99% of discord is just a replacement for Facebook and IRC for younger people and they don't interact outside of it). 

I offered community members several times money in exchange for a decompilation and documentation. Nobody ever really offered much of a gesture. And I mean, I offered $2500 cash for someone willing to go down a deep rabbit hole on IRIX stuff. Nah, yet they always asked me for "why doesn't this hacked together qemu shit work right???" And wouldn't take multiple opportunities to actually use a server or system with IRIX appropriately loaded and set up, nah they wanted the WSL1 experience. 

My point is not to disrespect anybody in that community and there are some people that are awesome and knowledgeable but rather to express frustration as to why I don't want anything to do with their closed community and I'm starting to become pissy when people ask me to trace down manpages or replicate behavior on ancient IRIX versions I don't even have access to. 

They don't want to document anything in a way that is easily searchable, they rely entirely on Discord's emphemeral and proprietary trash. When I tell them to go email somebody for a lead they whine until I do it, or complain about "boomers". 

It's very unproductive and toxic. And yes I know that some people have been annoyed because I tend to be a little bit grouchy nowadays and less inclined to waste my time on pet projects that don't have any oomph, but it's mostly because I'm used to now being compensated for my time. Whether it's in regards to my locksmithing career, for my maintenance here (by the patrons who have graciously stuck with us) and other things, it's just 20lb of shit in a 10lb bag when someone asks me to work for free on something that's going to take me hours to track down. And they aren't going to ever lift a finger or even willing to contribute back. And it's not that I am stupid or lazy, but it is readily apparent to me that I'm not cut out to make a living as a developer, I prefer to do that only when necessary to do it myself and it's not fun trying to sit here and wrap my head around things that I was burned out on from being years in technology fields. My brain is still just starting to recover from that shit. Maybe then I'll have much more time and my enthusiasm back but whatever. 

I tried everything possible to get these guys motivated to actually contribute to the community at Large. I had an n64 subforum. It was crickets. I repeatedly asked them to contact or interact with people here. Ask them to document interesting findings here. Or even just wikify their findings. And when I tell them that I don't understand something they just kind of look at me like I'm Jason Vorhees after he takes his mask off... You get the idea. 

So basically my philosophy going forward with outsiders interacting with this community is that unless they can prove good faith in a willingness to contribute back (e.g. as most users here have, the vintage community at large and most of SGUG as well, especially nowadays) I don't know how much effort I want to spend on these people. I'm going to do a little bit out of good faith here and there but I'm not going to sit here and be their StackOverflow for SGI shit. 

Sorry for the long winded bullshit but that's basically been my life as of this evening.