State self-destructs.

I really should have finished writing that article I had planned about net and zine culture. It could have at least warned all the State-kidz - and I use the phrase in its most patronising way - what they were getting into.

They begat a Scene. Scenes begat mutual loathing between personality sorts. That's the way it is, and that's the way it'll always be.

Scenes are about people coming together, despite themselves. Eventually, themselves can't stand everyone else they were forced to be close proximity with, and it shatters to the four winds.

The remaining fragments always think they're happier, as they don't have to deal with those people who they loathed. But they very rarely realise that the creative energy that was provoked by the temporary gathering together is lost, forever. Placidity and peace begat nothing. Scenes give - to quote the Buzzcocks - a different kind of tension.

But fuck it. Fragments are seeds. Seeds can do something else, eventually.

The Fanzine myth was always about bitchiness and evil hid beneath vaguely egailitarian sentiments. This is exactly what you sign up for when you join a scene. And some people will always leave when they get too bored.

Christ: Curran pissed off before the second issue was out or something.

Relax. This is how it was meant to play out, according to the archetypal structure of these things.

State's now a videogame forum. And isn't that what it was meant to be all along?