This manifesto is written for clocks, by a clock, and to inspire future clocks into doing more clocky things and being more clock-like, while clocking it out to clockin' tunes and watching amazing clock movies. Most clocks may not completely clock the ideas clocked about in the following pages, but those clocks can just go clock themselves.
     For those of you who are not clocks, and have never heard of the Clock Crew until this point, I highly suggest you save yourself the time and effort of reading this document. This manifesto assumes you are at least partially familiar with Clocks, its website, and its history. New clocks, in particular, would probably benefit from reading this document, as it provides a lot of reasons for some of the weird or unexpected things they may encounter while they're at this site, and will give them some insight into the past few years of the Clock Crew. However, that having been said, two groups of non-clocks might still find some interesting things in here: those researching online communities and those looking for an example of someone who has allowed himself to get a bit too involved in these things.
     The Clock Crew is a group of creative individuals, who give themselves the theme of characters that consist of inanimate objects with clocks on them, in order to give themselves something consistent to identify themselves with. The group actually has nothing to do with clocks, or even with its characters, though. It's only there to facilitate creativity, to allow people to focus on things other than the difficult, time-consuming process of art and animation, and to focus more on humor and story. We have fun and help each other make cool things. And that's precisely why I chose to write a mostly serious document, because irony is hilarious. Well, that and because after six years of interacting with a large group of people on a daily basis, I've osmosified a few too many ideas that I have the desire to share.
     So let's begin. For anyone with severe ADHD (and just about anyone raised on the Internet these days does, it seems), I'll save you from the excruciating pain of posting and just say: TLDR!
     
     
     
      "A simple change of name does not a clock make; it is determination, pride, and selflessness; first, reflecting and gaining the true realization that StrawberryClock is the King of the Portal; second, donating to the community, sewing an American flag and feeding the homeless; third, deliberate meditation upon the essential foundations of being a Clock; finaqlly, the technical affluence in producing cutting-edge Flash animations that allude the rather ignorant populace to the teachings of the Clocks. I wish you all the best, soon you will all be clocks... and that will be a fine day!" ~PineappleClock
     
     PineappleClock said these words back in 2001, during what is widely considered to be the "Golden Days" of the Clock Crew by those who have been around since then. This advice is about the only text from the elders that has survived; besides these words, we only have the older clocks' memories and their movies to study and guide us. While these words have influenced and guided many, many clocks, and still remains useful to this day, the advice is somewhat vague, and includes humor that doesn't really help us (not to mention American-centric; nowadays the Clock Crew has members from all over the English-speaking globe). However, the advice is compact, easy to remember, and has thus survived the test of time.
     And yet a couple years later, PineappleClock himself added an encyclopedic feature to the website, entitled Clockopedia, which allowed those given editor powers the capability to add as much literature as they deemed useful and necessary. For the first time in clock history, we could record the information that so far had to be passed orally from clock to clock, usually through private conversations, and thus prone to misunderstandings and errors, not to mention harassment from a constant barrage of new clocks that need to be told everything all over again. Clockopedia became the new place clocks were directed to, to be introduced to the Clock Crew, pointed to iconic and classic Flash that the Clock Crew has produced that they should be aware of, given general and individual histories, and letting them know any well established rules. The staff even implemented a seven day lurking period where people couldn't post to encourage people to read these materials.
     While Clockopedia ended up being a great success, it still suffers from the limitations all wikis have, and that is that due to conflicts between the knowledge and opinions of the editors, information tends to be sterilized in the process, and compromises have to be made. This is great for objective information, but it is not the best for a deep discussion on what it means to be a Clock and advice for new clocks, of which each individual clock seems to have a different opinion, as evidenced by the annual "What is the future of the Clock Crew?" discussions we have every year that always end up being inconclusive.
     Around the same time as Clockopedia was introduced, so was TIEM, a magazine that allowed for further literature to be made for the Crew, along with some rather insightful articles by some of the clocks. However, this magazine is intended mostly for entertainment purposes, and the format of articles tend to be short and do not permit the extensive introspection required to arrive at Truth. I am continually impressed with TIEM, but its format is not meant for my words..
     So the current literature that we have, while bountiful, is still not enough to guide all clocks, as evidenced by the numerous bans given out on a daily basis, and several permanent banishments that happen a few times every month. Some of these clocks just don't have the patience or the maturity to read the provided literature and adhere to its teachings, but others have read and still do not understand. And of those clocks that are respected enough not to be exiled, especially in recent times, there are some who are confused and do not understand where their destiny lies within the Clock Crew, and how to determine what path is the proper path to pursue, and which Clocks they should be listening to.
     Beyond that, the Clock Crew still remains a rather mysterious place, as not every decision that goes on behind the scenes is explained in full to the Clocks, and Clocks do not have elected representation within the Clock Crew to reflect their best interests. Because of this situation, these clocks can become extremely frustrated, and rightly so. The Clock Crew has not had to answer for its actions to date, and I feel it is time that someone reflects on these concerns and confusions that many clocks are having, and hopefully in the process give other Clocks useful information to guide them in their paths. I will embark on this journey myself, but I encourage anyone who has the inclination and the ability to meditate on difficult matters to do so as well, and maybe we can get some healthy, useful, and deep discussions going.
     
     
     
     Let's face it; no one has prepared you to become a Clock. Your schools never had classes on clock etiquette, your parents never had awkward coming-of-age conversations about your clockhood, your friends never tried to figure out what their clock names would be, your coworkers never gave you links to clock movies, your psychiatrists have never prescribed a daily dosage of B, and philosophers have never expounded on what it means to be a Clock. Some of their information you were raised with and have digested can be directly applied to your experience with the Clock Crew, but not everything. That information was intended to help you to find a job, find and develop a relationship, handle your responsibilities, and fight for your survival. You might think that everything would carry over to the Clock Crew, but the Clock Crew is much like a foreign country; with different customs, values, and ideas. And, just like a foreign country, if you're not careful about your behavior, you can very quickly find that you are not wanted here.
     This intolerant behavior on the part of the Clock Crew seems particularly hypocritical. After all, in hundreds of Clock movies, the clocks preach about peace and love, don't they? And yes, many movies do preach this. But by submitting movies to Newgrounds, and having a group where flash animations can be made fairly easily -- draw your own character, plop a bunch of other people's characters into your movie, draw a background, shuffle them around a bit, throw in some annoying background song, add a few digitized voices, and submit to Newgrounds -- the Clock Crew tends to attract a bunch of kids who are so immature that they cannot even communicate effectively without insulting or offending or asking questions that have been answered exhaustively in existing literature, that they end up interfering with the Clock's regular business on the forums, sometimes significantly.
     So there are a lot of stupid people that join wanting to become clocks, but that doesn't mean we should turn them away, should it? Well, the Clock Crew has had periods where we accepted pretty much anyone in the past, and in fact we still tend to allow people who don't break the rules to stick around, regardless of ability to get along with everyone or willingness to contribute to the group. Well,we only have to look to Newgrounds' own forums, before they added a moderation team, to see what would happen, as many of our users migrate from that very site. And it had become a mess. Once Tom decided to promote the Newgrounds forums besides a tiny, easily overlooked text link, it got a flood of terrible users who filled the BBS with idiocy, and all the quality long-time regulars of the forum ended up fleeing for better managed forums. I am one of those refugees, and it is one of the reasons why I'm on Clock Crew and I am not on Newgrounds.
     And to combat that, Newgrounds eventually, as soon as they were able to build the system, added moderators to help control the idiocy. And they did this even though they have a financial incentive to want to keep everyone who comes to their site happy and free to interact with the site as they see fit.
     However, that example is not entirely sufficient. While it is probably self-evident to most people that they do not want the forums to turn into something like Newgrounds did (or like 4-Chan still is), we still have to acknowledge that the Clock Crew has different philosophies than Newgrounds. No matter who the person is, or how they act, the philosophy suggests that we should embrace them and try to show them how to behave and mature into better people, and better clocks.
     In fact, we actually do this for the less severely damaged clocks. You might notice that there are some people here that manage to get temporary bans quite often and talk rather idiotically at times, yet have not been exiled from the site. These people are not total lost causes, and you will probably find several responsible, funny, and mature clocks that at one point in time were these sorts of people. You would not make the connection if you have only been around a short while, of course, since these situations take time, but there are many, many examples out there.
     So why not do this for the lost causes? Well, because it's a waste of energy that would be better put to use on other clocks. The individuals in the Clock Crew only have so much energy, and have to balance out their contributions to the Crew with their own personal matters, which, considering this community is filled with creative-minded people, can already take up much of their free time already. These lost causes most often would be better served by two to three years of general life experience; getting beat up a few times in school for having absolutely no idea what tact is, get suspended from school for shitting on the teacher's desk, and get banned from enough forums to realize that you can't just act however the hell you feel like, online or not, and not have to suffer any consequences. Once they have those experiences, if they can show the maturity to apologize and ask to be readmitted into the community, then we will be happy to have them. From that point of their maturity, we can then take them the rest of the way.
     But that's not what our philosophy states. Does that mean we should change it to "peace and love, but only to those who aren't complete morons, because we simply don't have the time or energy to deal with you"? I contend that we do not need to do that, as the philosophy is actually not aimed at how the Clock Crew, as a community, should treat other people, but how the individuals who are watching the movies should behave towards one another. Which, still seems a bit paradoxical, since those that are accepted into the Clock Crew should theoretically understand and accept this philosophy as their maxim, and thus treat even the annoying clocks with peace and love themselves.
     Here's where the annoying part comes in: not every clock accepts this maxim, and that explains why some clocks are assholes towards others, or give them tough love, or don't treat people well who haven't earned their respect. People actually joined the Clock Crew for several different reasons, and "peace and love", or respect for other people, is not always one of them. These people have gained recognition anyway, either with artistic ability, being funny, being around for a really long time, or helping with the website or other duties. These people also usually did not start out as assholes, and knew to show some tact until they became well-liked enough that the other members would let them get away with being mean to others.
     Sometimes, what other clocks regard as being mean is actually just people being extremely honest and brunt about their feelings. Oddly enough, this isn't really tolerated amongst newer people, unless they can show enough restraint to avoid directly insulting the other person, and even then it tends to cultivate hostility amongst the other clocks, and gives the staff more motivation to search for reasons to kick you out. If you start acting aggressive or egoistic right from the beginning, especially without trying to make friends, you're going to find yourself up on a tightrope, where one misstep will finish your career as a clock.
     In fact, one of the best ways to get by in the beginning of your creative journey with the Clock Crew is just to keep your head down, and only contribute to discussions when you have something original and positive to say, especially the first couple months. As time goes by you can be more and more yourself and people will appreciate it more, but just like in real life, the Clock Crew doesn't like a nail to stick too far out of the board, or else they'll make sure it gets hammered back in. It's an ugly part of human nature that even the Clock Crew can't quite escape from. But unlike real life, the Clock Crew will give you a chance to act however you feel like (within reason), after we've grown accustomed to you. And of course making Flash never hurts. In fact, making Clock Flash usually helps you bypass much of this undesirable conformity.
     I found the last paragraph to be extremely difficult to write. As a laid back guy who believes in freedom and doesn't like people's individuality to be squashed, I would hope that the group that I put so much time into and help lead would not be like that. But at the same time I don't like to control others (beyond what is necessary), and the Clock Crew has hundreds of individuals who also want to express their own individuality, which, at this point in time, appears to be synonymous with being hostile towards anyone who sticks out in the group, thus upsetting and stressing out the people they target, and encouraging them to leave, regardless of their honest and earnest attempts to try and figure out how to be accepted into the group. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but right now I can't see a better alternative.
     What does it mean to be a "Clock"? The word itself gives no real hints, it just suggests a time-keeping device, and our forums aren't filled with a bunch of posts reporting the time. However, the name should be given a meaning to replace the inherent assumptions people have regarding the word. And in fact, no one has really agreed entirely on what it means to be a clock, so trying to come up with a definition here should be pointless. And that may very well be the case. Nevertheless, I will try.
     The obvious, most simple, and completely useless definition of a clock, in the context of the Clock Crew, would probably be a person who adopts a character that consists of an cartoon object with a clock face and a corresponding name to go along with it. Hardly anyone would protest this definition. And why should they? It's completely boring. We could try adding "...who likes to make movies in Flash", but even that's becoming less and less accurate, as more people than ever are joining and gaining respect for other reasons, be it writing, music, programming, leadership, or just being fun to chat with. So we probably need to go a bit broader, but if we go too broad, then we risk not having anything useful there, either.
     So let's start with what PineappleClock provided us, above, although a bit broader. "A simple change of name does not a clock make," can be translated to "A clock is more than his name"; "first, reflecting and gaining the true realization that StrawberryClock is the King of the Portal," can maybe be translated to "understanding clock history and following its principles" ; " second, donating to the community, sewing an American flag and feeding the homeless " can be translated to "helping others" ; "deliberate meditation upon the essential foundations of being a Clock" can be translated to "introspection" ; " the technical affluence in producing cutting-edge Flash animations that allude the rather ignorant populace to the teachings of the Clocks " can be translated to "make clocky things others will enjoy."
     So, all together now, with some further modifications:
     
      "A clock is more than his name; he understands clock history and follows its principles, he helps others, he thinks before he acts, and he gives back to the community."
     
     Even this doesn't probably doesn't apply to everyone, but it's more clear than Pineapple's original quote, and much more useful. And judging by most discussions amongst staff and other clocks, if you take this quote to heart, and act as it suggests, you should have very little difficulty gaining recognition and respect within the Clock Crew.
     
     
     
      "In the Clock Crew, there are no leaders, no judges, and no government... we alone are the rightful leaders of the Clock Crew - Each and every one of us. The future of the Clock Crew rests on all of our collective shoulders, and the amount of love and patience we show our fellow clocks will directly affect the future of the Clock Crew." ~ PineappleClock, TIEM Issue 1
     
     The Clock Crew is currently run very much like the Roman Empire used to be, as an oligarchy, where a handful of Clocks, who were not elected, make all the important decisions for the running of the Clock Crew site and policing the clock's behaviors. This practice brings us back to the time when the elders, a benefactor, and a few assistants would run the site. Technically, we only run the Clock Crew site, not the Clock Crew itself (no one runs the Clock Crew), since we cannot police anyone's actions outside the site (and our IRC chat room), but since the vast majority of Clock Crew activity is on the website itself, we tend to be associated as also running the Clock Crew itself.
     Why make this distinction? Well, it should be kept in mind, since it shows we don't have ultimate power over what happens to the Crew. If we all decided to shut down the site and go our separate ways, within a couple days someone else would start a new Clock Crew site on their own web host, throw a forum on there, and most people would just migrate to that site; whoever ran that forum, and those he chooses to trust, would become the next leaders of the Clock Crew. This situation has happened to several websites in the past, including Clockcrew.com and Clockcrew.cc. So while we do have a large influence over the direction of the Clock Crew, we should not be seen as dictators, and if enough people become unhappy with our leadership and want to see fresh faces in there, you have the right to make another site and attract the clocks to it, instead.
     So, why should we even have an oligarchy to begin with? Why can't we have a democracy like most other civilized governments and several organizations around the world are run? To be honest, probably one of the biggest reasons why that does not happen is probably the maxim that once people acquire power they rarely like to give it up, so those of us in power aren't likely to want to give up our power if we don't have to. But there are other reasons.
     One problem is stability. As it is, we have had plenty of problems with this in the past, but there's always the risk of clocks electing someone who puts on a good show that he can be trustworthy into power, and then he abuses that power to destroy the site. We had just that event happen, even in an oligarchy, with Bit Clock, although he used our desperate need for web hosting at that point in time in order to get the position in the first place.
     Another problem is with elections in general. We would start to see clocks stop being creative and start becoming politicians; making promises they can't keep, cluttering the forums with their campaigns, making bargains with clocks to gain votes, and other particularly annoying political junk. And then, once these people that get elected based on their popularity (and elections are always a popularity contest; they never accurately reflect who would be the best leader), the rest of the staff, assuming they still managed to stick around due to the elections, would have to deal with these inexperienced clocks, who likely won't fit in with the rest of the staff. And before they even get a chance to really become comfortable with their position, they will have to focus on their re-election campaign, and probably won't be able to stick around long enough to really get any actual progress accomplished.
     Additionally, every clock probably has a different "grand vision" for the Clock Crew, and when they come in they'd probably put whatever existing projects that are in the pipeline on hold to focus on their own project, and then they'd get booted before that project was completed, and then the next person would put THAT project on hold for yet another new project, so it could potentially stagnate the Crew. Not to mention Pineapple is pretty much our only website programmer in the CC, currently, who is willing to improve the site, and he won't work on a project dictated by others, anyway, only his own personal projects (with suggestions from the staff) to improve the site, so anything the elected can do will be entirely limited to projects with the CC, which they are already free to do as regular clocks anyway.
     Oligarchies have their own sets of problems as well, though. The most significant problem is that while it allows those in power to become comfortable with each other, it also allows the leaders to become lazy or allow our personal lives to suck away at our time put aside for Clock Crew leadership, as there is little chance of us being kicked out by the rest of the leaders unless we actually do something destructive or severely unpopular, which also leads to stagnation, and this has happened with our current staff members, myself included. We haven't completely shirked our duties, and in fact we probably still do more for the CC than the vast majority of the clocks on the site, but the extreme job security has allowed us to let things drag on for way too long, and for some projects to be put off indefinitely. The only solution for this, that I can see, is if the staff are more open to the other clocks regarding what they intend to do, and if those clocks can make sure to keep communicating with the staff how much they would like to see these projects and asking what the status is on them.
     So how open has the current staff been with its users, and how often do we consider its input? I can only judge by my own personal experience with forums, but it appears to me that we are pretty open. We don't usually discuss decisions specifically with clocks, but we have avenues that clocks can use to communicate their ideas and feelings directly with the CC, such as the Suggestion Box as well as private and instant messaging. We do read these, and bring up anything that interests us for discussion with the rest of the staff. From there, the other staff give their opinions on the matter, and then one of the admins determines the general consensus for the issue, and then makes the required changes, and, if necessary, posts an announcement in the forums, possibly including the reasoning for the decision.
     This might not seem like it is as good of a policy as direct democracy, allowing each clock to vote on the issue themselves, but with any democracy, you risk the mob oppressing the few. For example, we already have serious problems when it comes to women in the Clock Crew, as I'll go into detail later, even with proactive actions taken by the staff. Maybe that means that we shouldn't even allow females into the group, since they'll just have a miserable time anyway, but that seems rather intolerant when the world around us has become more tolerant than it ever has been in the past, not to mention completely contradicts our philosophy.
     If mob rule had their way with everything, on the Clock Crew we would probably see a moratorium on new members (probably go invite only, actually), all existing clockfriends who aren't really popular would be banned, staff wouldn't be able to take any action against classic, but jaded members who do nothing but spam the forums when they're around, more rules would be made then could be kept track of (even by the staff), and the BBS would probably start resembling the cesspit that are Yahoo News! Discussion boards or Youtube's video comments, filled with absolute junk, and ultimately worthless.
     I will concede that I am exaggerating and the forums probably wouldn't get that bad. And a valid argument against that would be "Well, while democracy over policing users might not be a smart idea, why can't we democratically determine Clock Crew policy?" We don't do this, because by and large, most of the activities the Clock Crew does as a group rely on the motivations of the individuals administrating these activities, from Clock Crew Academy, to Clockopedia, to CDs, to Collaborations. If we left that to democratic rule, then these people, who are doing this in their spare time, for no compensation, out of the goodness of their clock hearts, would certainly feel less attached to these projects and may, in fact, lose all motivation to continue with these projects in the first place. And as for large, sweeping policy, such as where our servers will be hosted, or who our ambassador may be for communicating with other sites (heh, who am I kidding? I mean Newgrounds), or who should be added or removed from the staff, we have so few of those issues anyway, it's not really worth putting these up for debate. If clocks are unhappy with those decisions we make, they'll let their opinions be known anyway, and if enough people voiced dissent on the issue, there's a good chance we'd change the policy anyway.
     An oligarchy doesn't work very well with the wrong people in charge, and we've been lucky to have gotten to this point where we have a set of admins and moderators who get along with each other, don't step on each others' toes too often, are willing to put some extra effort in from time to time, and are willing to talk with any clock about almost anything that is bothering them. There was a time in our past where we weren't so lucky (Bit), but hopefully we won't have a repeat of that situation, especially with our hosting problems solved. Now we also know that it isn't wise to give total power to any one clock, but to share that power equally, and I say this even as someone who at one point in time was vying for that position of total power when it looked like we needed someone for that position.
     I realize this whole section probably sounds like an ego-stroking, high-fiving the rest of the staff love-fest, and there may be a little of that in there, but I really felt that there hasn't been hardly any discussion over the government the Clock Crew has, and that there was probably some people out there who felt that it could be done better by different people or with a different system, or who might be new around here and don't understand why the site got to this point where it is run the way it is, and many other people probably have just been accepting the system blindly without even turning a critical mind towards it, much like they might do with their own country's government.
     However, for many of us, we are on this site for a pretty significant chunk of our lives, some of us possibly even more than they interact with the outside world, and the government on this site, while fairly minimal, still is responsible for the quality of your experience while you're on the site, and might be worth putting in a few moments here and there to consider it and what you want out of it.
     Clockification is the exception to the rule, as we just recently implemented a democratic clockification system. As expected, as a result of this, clockfriends have been clockified at a faster rate than before, which may or may not be a good thing, but at least the decision is up to 100 other people now, and not just a couple of people on the staff. If this experiment is successful, we may try the experiment with other things around the site. Experimentation is pretty much always a good thing.
     
     
     
      "What I see is pretty much that most of the guys can't treat a female poster normally. Either they're: constantly pandering for their attention (replying back and forth endlessly if said female makes the mistake of replying to them), being a "huff! what are you doing here, cooze?" asshole, because they blame the girl for the guys lavishing her with attention, or because they feel obligated to act the opposite of that to not look like an idiot, trying to chivalrously defend the female at every turn without checking if it's wanted ("how dare you say that about her! mods! mods! ban this asshole!")."
     ~ StrangeClock, Clockcrew.cc BBS
     
     At the moment, there are approximately 600 active members of the Clock Crew. Of that six hundred, approximately 10 of them are female. That's about 0.2% of the population. Even my computer science classes in college had better ratios than that! (1 female per class of 30, usually, or 3%). The Clock Crew has always had a similar number of active female clocks at any given time, but since the number of male clocks keeps increasing, the percentage keeps getting smaller and smaller. We get new females from time to time, but they usually replace others who have left, and they, too, tend to leave by the time the next trickle comes along. A couple have become permanent fixtures, and we're thankful for that, but it's no secret the Clock Crew is practically a boy's club.
     So why are the numbers so pathetically small in the first place? Well, we're on the Internet, so that knocks out a handful of women right there, although we're almost to the point where that effect is negligible. We're also an Internet community, which tend to have limited female involvement anyway, so cut a few more away there, although there's plenty of communities out there that have much higher ratios of women than we do anyway, and even the more niche communities tend to have higher ratios than we do, such as video games forums, first person shooter clan forums, esoteric humor like 4-chan, creative communities like DeviantArt, even Newgrounds, our main recruitment resource, has a higher ratio of women members than we do (it's probably around 25% who use the site and review movies, and even those who just use the forums it's probably 5-10%).
     Sure, our recruitment numbers are low, but if that was our only problem, our ratio would be much higher (a solid 10% at least). But no, we also lose them, and we lose them much more reliably than we lose male clocks (and additionally, once we lose them, they tend to stay gone, unlike their male counterparts). We lose about 90% of all the females that join (and post) here, whereas we lose about 40% of all the males that join (and post).
     And from what I've seen, it seems the main reason we lose these people (besides personal life getting in the way, which happens to all of us), actually seems to be due to harassment more than anything else. We do attract a lot of younger boys and teens to this site, and many of them by the simple fact that they're on here all the time have very little in the way of a social life, which probably means they don't really know how to conduct themselves in the company of women. And then there's another class of people here, who feel they need to treat these women exactly as if they were one of the guys and not self-censor any of their thoughts around them, simply because that seems to be what is demanded of them in a society that values feminism, or even because they feel the need to assert their individuality and nihilist ways and not abide by any social mores of decency, as is pretty common behavior for clock movies themselves.
     There's several reasons for it, but regardless it ends up with the same result: in just about every thread a female makes it's not uncommon to find some clocks fawning over the females, adulating them and giving them unending attention, some people openly mocking and berating those clocks for acting that way, or providing a counterpoint to the adulation that's usually pretty blunt and rude ("Oh come on! She's not great! It's just a few tweens and some filters! My 8 year old retarded brother can do that!"), a few clocks making off-topic crass humor like they always do, and a few others talking about how sexy this chick is and how often they like to jerk off to the one small, grainy picture the girl posted one time in a moment of naive optimism. Then these different attitudes usually starts a nice confrontation that extends the thread for 10 pages and requires it to be closed to get everyone to cool off, thus completely derailing whatever question or topic the female clock was interested in and thus making the topic of no use to her, and the whole thing repeats itself every time thereafter that she posts, thus frustrating her and making her give up and leave.
     The only females that usually escape this nonsense are those who either don't mind the extra attention to begin with (and can ignore the negative attention), or those that don't reveal in their posts (or stated at the beginning) that they are women, and built a reputation for themselves before their gender became widely known, and thus clocks tend then to leave them alone, for the most part.
     The staff goes out of its way to keep other users under control, but the problem is so pervasive it feels like we're trying to mow a lawn with tweezers, and we can only chill or ban the clocks after the fact; by then, the damage is done, and the female has probably seen this clocks' infidelities and been negatively affected by it. That's not to say that women have thin skins, though; imagine just trying to participate (politely, even) on a forum, and yet everyone just irrationally flames you left and right (for an example, try posting as an atheist on a fundamentalist forum, or as an anarchist on a police officers forum). Sure, you might stick around for awhile if you are determined enough, but even you probably won't last too long in that situation. And while the women aren't usually being directly flamed in actuality, these posts have a similar effect. And regardless, the staff cannot control the actions of anyone outside the forums, so these users can harass women as much as he is able to.
     So how do we make this place more hospitable to women? Do we ban everyone permanently who engages in any of this negative behavior towards women, since the shorter bans don't appear to be taking care of the problem? That would get unpopular really fast, as even the more respected clocks start getting kicked out, plus clocks would probably avoid talking to the women at all to avoid risking being kicked out, which would give the women no reason to stay either. Do we start holding 'Women Appreciation Classes' periodically, where we give people lessons on how to act like a gentleman? It's a possibility, but attendance cannot be forced, and the worst-behaving clocks aren't likely to look into them. Do we start heavily encouraging, with rewards perhaps, going to more female-rich sites (anime/rpg/art forums) and try actively recruiting them? I like this idea, but I doubt too many clocks would do it without a harmony-like award they could gain for it, and it would be hard to determine how effective it is without a referral system in place (although perhaps long term we'd notice), and even then we'd still have to deal with those with crappy attitudes scaring those people away. Same goes for making more 'cutesy', or at least less violent, clock flashes in an attempt to attract more women.
     Another alternative would be advertising ourselves as more than a flash group (females tend to make art or write a whole lot more than animation, and we do art and writing also, we just never advertise it). The problem with that, though, is the people who don't feel we should advertise at all or those that feel we are straying too far from our "clock roots" if we talk about or recruit people for anything other than Flash movies. Still, we've been heading this way for years, from the writing contests to the "I'll draw you!" threads to Clock Crew Radio, and it hasn't even put a dent in the amount of Flash produced yet. Instead, it's included more participation from our members who are less skilled and less inclined to work in Flash to give something back to the Crew (even I'm more of a game developer and a writer than a flash animator). Flash animations can benefit from a greater focus on developing the Crew's music, writing, and art skills anyway, as those are precisely the areas that our more serious movies are weakest in.
     Here's something I want all male clocks to realize: I know that whatever new girl that started posting here might have gotten your attention simply because the fact that she's posting here must already mean she's creative, likes cartoons, and has a similar sense of humor compared to you, but please realize that about fifty other guys have decided the same thing, please also realize that there's almost zero chance that she will be interested in starting a serious long distance relationship with you (or anyone in general), and please also realize that she's no idiot and will see your private messages where "you're just trying to help out" and "only trying to be friendly", that you're actually obsessing about her and trying to subversively win her heart. If you really wanted to be a true friend, you'd only offer your help when she asks for it, with no other pretenses, with no peacock talk about how much of a ladies' man you are (or aren't) or what great accomplishments you've achieved. Even if you swear you've worded your messages in a way that she won't notice your ulterior motives, keep in mind that there's probably at least 8 other clocks that are doing the same thing, and she'll get suspicious just by the unusual amount of people messaging her by itself.
     And just in case there's a girl here who hasn't understood that yet (not likely, but just in case): I'm one of the administrators on this site, and yet I only get private messages when someone wants something or has a question. There are a few clocks who will instant message me whenever they spot me online and when they're bored, but those conversations never really go much deeper than "Check out this funny video/sweet game I saw/played!" or "Wow, that BlahClock really is an prick, isn't he?" They don't take every opportunity they can to tell me their life stories. If they feel the need to share those, they'll post them in a topic in the forums instead. If you've run into a clock who's engaging in this behavior, he's mostly likely trying to get into your virtual pants.
     Now this behavior, by no means, applies to all the clocks on this website. Really we only have a relatively small percentage who are guilty of this behavior. However, that small percentage really make themselves known EVERY time a female shows her face around here, and just makes her experience much less enjoyable You guys are like the one heckler in the audience that won't shut the hell up during a comedian's performance: you make the comedian uncomfortable and you ruin it for the rest of us. Please, please, start considering your actions around women on these forums. There are PLENTY of other places on the Internet you can take this behavior, that aren't suffering from a severe drought of females like we are, and I ask you to please take it to those places instead. Hold your tongue while you're here, and lash out as much as you want elsewhere. Maybe eventually we'll have enough females here that you won't be competing for the affection with fifty other clocks, anyway.
     I realize I'm not a female myself, and so therefore haven't experienced this firsthand or know exactly how bad or what the experience is like, or how those females that have stuck it out would prefer the situation to be handled, so my argument may not be based on all the best information. I concede this weakness, but I wrote this more to spur more dialogue on the subject, and perhaps to get some of the females themselves to share their thoughts on the subject. The situation has gone almost entirely undiscussed for so long, and it's time something was done about it. We get a lot of added color and a fresh perspective from our female users, and I really don't think we should allow that to be destroyed by the handful of assholes we have here.
     
     
     
     At first glance, a Clock Crew film seems to conform to a specific style and format. A bunch of clocks, usually friends of the author, thrown into the movie almost at random, computer generated voices, a plot where something nonsensical happens, and the viewer is left going "What the hell did I just waste my time watching?" Seems simple enough to anyone who knows how to make flash. But once they sit down and make their own flash, they find out that their efforts might not be as well received as they thought. It has all of the elements, sure, but it just doesn't have the "feel".
     So when an artist is told this, they demand to be informed as to what the clocks mean by "feel", as that really doesn't tell them anything tangible for improving their movie that they're expecting, like "less witty banter!" or "more giraffe sex!" Because a clock can't really effectively describe the "feel" of a true clock movie, the artists can easily get discouraged and might feel they've joined the wrong community.
     We've lost a couple of extremely talented artists due to this problem already, and possibly even a few more that haven't been as blatant. Still other clocks might be curious themselves what this "feel" might be.
     Well, an easy, but time-consuming way to get a "feel" for a true clock movie would be to watch as many clock movies as you can find, particularly the classics, and to hang around the forums for a couple years, and you'll absorb it through osmosis, but that doesn't really help people who want that information now, today, so they can make great, funny clock flashes and build their reputation. So I will do my best to try and define such a vague definition as "feel".
     First of all, I think the "feel" of a clock movie that we're describing is not entirely dissimilar to the "soul" or "spirit" or "collective unconsciousness" that especially religious people or introspective artists/writers/musicians tap into when they create. It's something you can find by sitting down, looking inward, and writing out any ideas that speak back to you. This may just be your brain making unusual connections based on your life experiences and feeding any interesting connections it finds back at you, and I tend to agree, but a lot of really intelligent people have argued throughout the centuries that something like this exists, and if you're defeatist enough to believe that you don't have an original or pursuit-worthy thought in your head, you might want to try believing in these powers, at least enough that you can use them for making excellent clock movies.
     All of my best ideas come when I have a pen and paper and a quiet room and have prepared myself to receive them. I'm comfortable, I might not even have my eyes open, but if I do I'll be staring at nothing in particular, eyes unfocused, and hazy. I might have some classical or electronic music playing in my headphones to drown out any environmental noises as well as the extremely busy voices in my head that want to distract me with such incredibly important matters as what I'll eat in a few hours or reminding me that I'm down to my last pair of underwear and I really ought to be doing my laundry, or how much I'd really like to sleep with that petite girl who's probably underage who rung up my groceries the night before. The music really should be lyric-less, as otherwise my brain focuses on the lyrics of the song and stops clearing itself out. And then, whenever something pops in my head, I write it down, trying not to judge how viable of an idea it might be or waste time trying to determine whether it's really a creative idea and not just a stray thought about breakfast, since even if it is it might trigger a string of associations in my mind that leads to something that just might end up being a good idea after all. Usually the process only takes a half an hour, and I'm left with several ideas that are worth considering further.
     Okay, so you've got the idea generating part down, or perhaps that was never a problem for you. The problem is once you start making the movie it somehow morphs into a Hollywood film before your eyes, with good guys versus bad guys, a sacrifice, heavy-handed melodrama, a love interest, all that junk. And originally it was just intended to be a movie about how Strawberry Clock trying to feed uranium to a duck at the park. Hollywood is particularly evil about that. We've absorbed so much of its movies and television that our brains seem to think that everything needs to follow in its well-trodden path. There are two ways to combat this line of thinking. One is to start reading books, and not those that are on the bestsellers' lists (unless they're considered modern classics). Books written by talented authors don't usually suffer from the problems of Hollywood, and it will introduce your mind to subjects and characters and plot that your mind used to subconsciously think were off limits; like deeply flawed protagonists (instead of only having a single minor or tragic flaw, like most Hollywood/Greek heroes), meandering plots in what seems at face value to be boring locations but contain a lot of interesting scenes and insights about life, plots revolving around societal taboos (incest, pedophilia, homosexuality, rape, selfishness, etc, all of which are more prevalent, and in some cultures even celebrated, in our history than Hollywood leads you to believe). Hollywood touches on these sometimes, but they pretty much always turn it into something saccharine and meaningless. Watching foreign films will sometimes help, as well, since they tend to be lower budget and are less interested in playing to the lowest common denominator. That's not to say that you make movies about the very worst areas of our society (I personally am not very interested in having works associated with that and tend to make things that are more lighthearted and humorous), but being exposed to these things helps shake your mind awake and out of its groove that's causing the creative block, and will make you more aware of the world around you and help you absorb experiences that you think ARE worth sharing in new ways with other people.
     Another way to fight Hollywood is whenever you notice you're going down Hollywood's path, spend a few minutes thinking of unexpected things that Hollywood would never do in a movie, and then add that to your story. For one of my novels the most un-Hollywood thing I could think of would be to kill the main character halfway through the story, instead of at the end, like most novels that kill their heroes do. This lead the novel into a completely different path (a journey through the afterlife and a comical conversation with the Creator), and I think the novel became much more interesting because of it.
     Why do I feel I need to relate these methods of original ideas? One of the main problems I think a lot of artists have is imitation. They watch a few classic clock movies, find something they really enjoy, and then try to make their own movie in a pale imitation of its style. I really believe that's the wrong way to go about it, and hopefully by sharing a few techniques that I use to get around it.
     If I had to define creativity, I would define it as "Making a connection between two separate ideas that no one has previously used before, and using your brain to combine them in a way that makes other see that the connection works." The Clock Crew utilizes several of these. Coolboyman came up with "Strawberry + Clock", along with "crap flash + piss off NG", OrangeClock broadened it to "inanimate object + clock" and "strawberry clock + king" and "clock crew + propaganda", amongst others. Later clocks made even further connections (Other clubs have websites, so "clock crew + website". People hate us, so "clocks + love" and "clocks + immortal" and "clocks + heroes" and "clock crew + never dies") and it's grown organically from that point to what is now part of a large and growing part of Clock Crew Lore.
     
     
     
     Five thousand years from now, after mankind has gone through countless of wars and petty battles and huge technological breakthroughs, it would be nice if the archaeologists of the future could dig up statues of a giant letter B, a bronze Strawberry Clock on his throne, the scorch and shattered edge where the Void was finally successfully fought off in a desperate last minute maneuver, the remains of clock homes with mostly intact clock flash lining the shelves of petrified bookcases, and ratted sheets of paper buried in caves detailing the transactions of cc's between the clock staff.
     Obviously, that isn't going to happen. If the CC were frozen at its current state, and we fast forward even a couple of hundred years, the only evidence of our existence would probably be Leek's clock puppets and StrawberryClock costume, a few poorly spray-painted Strawberry Clocks that are probably already painted over by now, and a few glitchy versions of our homepage on archive.org. That's it. That's our legacy, despite the thousands of movies that have been lovingly created by its members, the endless discussions on everything from how gay Mario Sunshine is to our masturbation habits, the songs, the stories, the Skype conversations, the meetings, etc, etc, etc.
     We rely way too much on Newgrounds, and I'm not even including the fact that we are now hosted by them. We have thousands of flash movies on their website, and we're counting on them 100% not to have multiple corrupt hard drives, not to miss a website backup, not to have a guy hack their website and surreptitiously corrupt submission dates and views and awards, not to have an author decide he doesn't want to be associated with his old movies anymore and delete everything (Drunkmagikoopa), not to have our reviews deleted (we see how that one is already being trampled over), and for the website itself to last at least as long as the Clock Crew does, and beyond. Now it's probably likely NG will last another 5 years, and it's even pretty likely it could last 10, but every year Tom gets older, and as much as NG is his baby, he will eventually get to the age where he wants to focus more on other vocations (game development), spend more time with his wife and children, and not be able to keep up with the thousands of emails he gets every week and the administrative decisions he has to make to keep his website competitive and keep users from migrating to other competing websites. And he'll want to spend more and more time making console games, and all those buyout deals he passed on in the past will start to look more and more attractive to him, especially in this age where simple concept, 2 year-old startups with only a few million users can easily net $200+ million.
     And the longer we wait, and keep relying on Newgrounds to maintain our history for us, the more and more content we will have to catalog, and the harder it will be to keep up with everything, and the more and more likely we will lose valuable pieces of our history along with it.
     Not to mention, by limiting ourselves almost entirely to Newgrounds, we also limit what can be stored about our history. Newgrounds only hosts Flash (and audio, but its size limits are tiny, keeping out most of our Skype conversations, plus its search functions are horrible and the portal in general, goes mostly unnoticed). Audio, text, conversations, web designs, community art, comics, etc, the rest of this either has to be posted elsewhere, like Deviant Art, which is more of a user showcase and not a group showcase, not to mention deathly slow and has strict rules for submissions, or be hosted on our own website. Thankfully, we as of recently have the CC Articles section and the FLA Library, but that still doesn't account for everything.
     Newgrounds also has pretty poor search capabilities, which keeps us in the dark quite a bit about our own history. Can we say with any confidence how many clock movies there are on Newgrounds (unless they have clock in the title or are in the clock crew collection). No, we can't. And if you don't know the title or author of a somewhat obscure clock movie, good luck finding it.
     The movies on Newgrounds also are missing anything the Clock Crew adds to it, such as our discussions about the movie, any awards we've given it (winner of best use of animation in the Halloween Flash competition, or won clock flash of the month on November 2007), any mentions of its historical significance, copies of earlier versions of the content for comparisons or educational purposes, pieces of that work broken down so that people can make "remixes" of the piece, etc. It just has the initial praise we've given it and the hate or ambivalence that other NG users have for it. And that doesn't even include the little Flash that users decide not to submit or don't pass judgment, an example being the "Mario Sunshine is gay" flash Olskoo made to mock Zidane and PlumClock that is only still around because I just happened to copy a bunch of files off the .CC server a few weeks before it went under and would be lost forever.
     So I think we have two major problems regarding leaving our own footprint on the rest of the world: Firstly, just about everything we've done is digital, and will eventually, given enough time, expire or be deleted off individual clock's hard drives and servers, and secondly, what we do have still is scattered a bit too much between Newgrounds, Deviant Art, Youtube, the Clock Crew site, and people's hard drives.
     Some of you might question why we would even want to leave traces of our existence for the future, even after we're gone. Well, I can't speak for everyone, and I might not be able to convince you individually, but the Clock Crew, as a group, has had tens of thousands of man hours invested into it, and to see such an interesting and creative group not be acknowledged by history and vanish without a trace means we did something wrong. Even local sewing clubs can get a mention in the local newspaper and some of their quilts passed down from generation to generation, leaving a small mark, yet a mark nonetheless. We should be capable of more than that, and besides, it would be fun to leave cryptic things around.
     The conversion of our creative works to digital objects is actually an unfortunate by-product of our information society. DVDs don't last anywhere near as long as paper, nor do hard drives (50 years max as opposed to 2000+ years), so future archaeologists are probably going to have a difficult time studying the early age of the Internet, as only a tiny fraction of whatever is on the Internet ever gets transferred to print or video. So I really think that there should be a concerted effort to get more of the CC into more physical media. Clocks should make figurines, knowledge about the CC should be collected into book formats and self-published, music should be created and disseminated (CDs and peer-to-peer, it may be digital but at least it'll get passed around), canvas paintings should be made (someone make a duck.fla painting already!), DVD collections of classic videos should be made and distributed, etc, etc. Give some broke college student in the year 2200 something interesting to write his thesis about, how a group of eclectic, but creative geniuses fought to prove their existence to a society that actively and passively tried to pretend didn't exist.
     And for maintaining our own digital history, we really need to do more to keep it organized. It would be really nice if there was a 'museum' feature online for storing the works that Newgrounds can't, and we should be passing around burnt DVDs and hosting torrents of collections of CC history so it's as widely disseminated as possible. We should also have our own portal, with a better search system, embedded CC awards, links to threads on the forum where it was and can be discussed, and statistics so we know, at a glance, just how much of a monster our creative body of work has become. And it should support formats that Newgrounds can't (audio, etc), linking to Newgrounds when available, and the item on the Museum otherwise. Plus ways to classify it, as belonging to the ".CC era" or whatever, things that other websites wouldn't care about but are significant to us.
     Because we're limited for space on our own servers, this should probably be a 3rd party project. MillenniumClock, at one point, was working on a project similar to this himself, but never got around to finishing it and eventually disappeared from the CC altogether.
     
     
     
     
      "The CC is a pretty unique social phenomenon. The only other place I've seen it's sort of site independence is in communities of old regulars from dead sites. Even they don't generally last very long and almost never see significant increases in membership. It seems that in most cases, when a site goes down permanently, people are content, or at least willing, to let it die quietly. Then you have the Clock Crew, which refuses to be put down, always finding a way to regroup and, most importantly, continue to grow." ~ Albino Clock, Clockcrew.cc BBS
     
     Since the last section focused on our past, it would make sense to also discuss our future, especially since, year after year, someone manages to post a "Future of the Clock Crew?" thread, and then fifty or so clocks try to predict the exact year the Clock Crew will die out, and for what reasons, and every year they get proven wrong as the community keeps building and participation keeps increasing.
     It's difficult to predict the future with any real accuracy, but I will make a few anyway:
     
     1. The Clock Crew is going to be around for quite some time.
     
     The Clock Crew has already lasted for six years. The vast majority of businesses, magazines, creative ventures, books, organizations, etc. do not last that long. While the line determining whether something is a fad or not is vague, we've definitely passed the line. The Clock Crew is not going to easily fade out, since at the core of it all, the Clock Crew is really just the idea that we're helping each other become more productively creative, and not to care so much about the quality of our works, that it's more important that you're having fun and enjoying yourself while you contribute. And that idea is very powerful, and very compelling. Unfortunately, we're not very good at advertising to the outside world what our real message is, and as such our growth has always been small. But once you come for a visit and find out what it's really about, you get caught in our web, and it's difficult to escape it.
     The theme of clocks is relatively unimportant, except for its branding and providing conventions that allow a creative person to focus on things other than making amazing art and animation if they don't feel like it (like story and humor). As such, even though some people may get sick of the politics and the idiocy that the group sometimes attracts, there will still be people who will want to keep it together for the very real benefit it provides to its community.
     
     2. The Clock Crew is going to become less centered around Flash animations and put more focus on creative activities in general.
     
     This change will not happen overnight. It's going to happen pretty gradually, and there will be plenty of people opposing it because they are fundamentalists and cannot fathom the idea of the Clock Crew evolving from what it perceives as its roots. But as #1 illustrated, these people are mistaken in these roots. The medium is not important, the creativity is. And there are several people attracted to the CC, myself included, who desperately want to contribute to the community but find the process of animating in Flash to be dull and tedious, or not worth their time. These people will often have other things to add to the community, whether it be writing stories or screenplays, becoming clock historians, programming games or features on the site, composing music, being entertaining podcast or radio personalities, sharing new ideas and visions for the Clock Crew, providing valuable feedback to other people's flash, organizing and hosting collaborations and competitions, as well as others I have not mentioned or have been made aware of.
     These people exist and contribute now, and have for years, but because we stubbornly insist that we identify the Clock Crew as a Flash community, these efforts do not get anywhere near as much attention as a quality flash artist. In turn, this lack of attention can frustrate and breed a lack of confidence in the clocks that contribute in other ways, and might discourage further participation. But these people have been making a lot of ground, especially in the last couple of years, and hopefully in another year or so the Clock Crew will stop identifying itself solely as a flash community and more as a creative community. I think, and I hope, that it will.
     
     3. Within the next year or two, someone will release some clock flash that will inspire people and update clock flash conventions.
     
     This has been needed for quite some time. It's been quite a while since anyone has gone beyond defining the character archetypes, adding an animated triangle for denoting which clock is speaking, masking clock faces, random clocks per viewing, "cannot kill", and satirizing popular movies for establishing new clock conventions. Some people have made attempts, but for the most part they haven't caught on. I think a key element that people should be taking advantage of is that Flash's greatest strength is that it is interactive, so clock movies should take greater advantage of this interactive capabilities, which requires clocks to learn Actionscript, which many just don't want to do. For example, I rarely make clock movies, but when I do, I try to add little elements to them that require Actionscript to utilize.
     For example, in "Cableshaft Meets SBC", I had the title screen and credits glide about on the screen. If I had done this with animation only, this would have taken me quite some time and a lot of headache to do (considering I had about a minute of title/credits it probably would have taken me a good 2-3 hours to do with tweens, and it would be a lot more static), but I only had to write a simple script once, that took me about 20 minutes to figure out, and then I pasted it on each text element and suddenly my title was much more dynamic. I also made the clock faces on the clocks jitter randomly while they spoke, which would have taken many, many hours to do without the help of Actionscript. Other ideas for you could be a shaky camera, fancy screen wipes or transitions, easter eggs a la Homestar Runner, interactive sections a la Jazzy Jones, choose your own adventures, "movie-like" special effects (like shimmering portals, simulated rain/snow, and realistic fires), letting people import a picture or swf that becomes a character in the movie (allowing them to become the stars of the movie), programmed lip synching (South Park does this, they don't manually place each mouth), programmed complex animations, and I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas you can come up with that I haven't.
     Just remember, Actionscript is not only for menus or for game development. It can drastically help make your movie more interesting or sometimes more easy to make (because you only have to program each effect once, whereas you have to animate the equivalent each and every time), also.
     I also feel the next big convention change will become switching to voice acting, hence #4.
     
     4. As we get more talented voice actors, voice acting will supplant, and eventually overtake, digitized voices in more ambitious clock movies.
     
     Digitized voices are easy, but they're difficult to understand at times, they don't represent emotion, and they can get annoying. I don't think digitized voices will ever go away, but I do know we have some talented voice actors (and actresses) in the Clock Crew already, and we will start to see more and more clock movies use voice acting instead.
     In some ways voice acting is actually easier. Instead of having to tweak the dialogue of each exchange so it is actually understandable, you ask for some voice applicants, screen their demos, pick your talent, screen what they give you, make suggestions for what you don't think works, and place the results into the movie. Most of the work is just the talking, and the waiting.
     And that's a big part of the problem with voice acting, also. Digitized voices are reliable. The software is sitting there on your desktop, just a double-click away, and provides poor, but consistent, audio on command. Voice actors, on the other hand, are in relatively short supply, so they get to pick which projects they want to work for, and they can take their own sweet time in getting any work to you, so your movie stays in stasis while you wait. And even then, you could run into creative differences.
     However, the benefits, score-wise, as well as the benefit of a well delivered, well timed joke, are clear, and I think more people are going to turn to voice acting their more serious flash projects in the coming years. We've also started to see some amazing voice talent emerging recently, as well, with Leek, Strange, Blackmagic, and Rose, and I think we'll see more emerging voice talent with our continued growth and with our increased emphasis on radio, music composition, voice chat, and podcasts.
     
     5. While staff will continue to think of fun and engaging activities for clocks to participate in, clocks will not rely on the staff so much to keep them entertained and will create their own activities, more often.
     
     Those of us on the staff continually strive to find new activities for everyone to enjoy (if for no other reason, than to keep us engaged in fun activities while we're on the site also), but it's become pretty obvious lately that our personal lives can often get in the way of our best intentions. I've been terrible about keeping up with my writing contests, new activities have often started and then sputtered into nonexistence due to a lack of dedication and participation, and school or work or personal crisis can sometimes heavily interfere.
     I can tell some of you are starting to get restless, and are tired of just coming to the BBS to hang out every day. But in the boon we had last year, it seems many of you have become overly reliant on the staff to provide you with entertaining activities, and you really shouldn't. Only you know exactly which sorts of activities you would enjoy. The staff can only guess as to what they are, and we'll only be as dedicated as much as the activities are enjoyable to us as well.
     I can only urge you guys to, whenever you get so bored you feel the need to harass fellow members of the CC, to try to think of something cool you could organize yourself. The feeling of accomplishment after a successful collaboration or contest is incredibly fulfilling. I don't necessarily see this as being a definite trend, but I hope it will, and I hope that bringing it up might spur some of you to action.
     
     6. The Clock Crew will make greater attempts to spread its ideas and promote its utility beyond Newgrounds.
     
     A lot of you guys complain about the quality of the members that come in, and likewise, you constantly talk down about the quality of the users that browse Newgrounds. Well, considering our only real pool of recruitment IS from this "so-called" cesspool of the users of Newgrounds, it should come as no surprise that you are dissatisfied with those who join the Clock Crew. If this is really bothering you, the best way to combat this is to spread the ideas of the Clock Crew to other locations besides just Newgrounds.com. Are there any sites whose users you DO respect? Then you should be doing whatever you can to recruit members from those places.
     And as mentioned above, I really think we need to look outside Newgrounds if we want to increase our female:male ratio, at all.
     The Clock Crew IS a great place to hang out, and encourage people to be more creative, and there are thousands of quality artists and writers and programmers out there who would benefit incredibly by spending some time with the Clock Crew, and we would likewise benefit in return. But we're just not getting out there enough, and the message that people ARE getting isn't always all too positive.
     Leek's Youtube venture is a promising one, even though most people tend to agree that those that comment on that site are about the lowest scum on the planet, but the broadcasters there do tend to be interesting people, and are worth attracting. Plus Youtube has become the best way to influence the media get the most exposure nowadays anyway. But it's still not enough. There's hundreds of creative sites out there none of us even touch, let alone advertise our clockiness! Newgrounds, DeviantArt, and SheezyArt, and the occasional iSketch game are just about the only places we share our art and animations with.
     Certainly there's other sites out there, and the benefit with the smaller sites is that there's less non-clock noise to compete with. I need to start researching this more myself, and before too long I'll try to compile a list of promising sites to go clockify.
     
     "In 2025 all clock names will be taken, so clocks are instead assigned a number. Not having made a Flash movie for 19 years, I'll be berating 15195Clock for still making his movies in outdated 4D with the simulated voices of dead 80s moviestars, especially because he doesn't even insert the proper smells during the forest scene." ~ Strange Clock, Clockcrew.cc BBS
     
     Admittedly most of these aren't very risky predictions, as there are already evidence of most of these points out there already, but that doesn't mean they're not worth pointing out, especially for those people who may not be aware of them or may not be in agreement, to help spur some dialogue. For the most part, however, I think we've been going, more or less, in the right direction, and we should, at the very least, continue to do what we've been doing for the past couple of years.
     
     
     
     We've been through a lot these past six years, and I am thankful to have been a part of this phenomenon. But no group of the size we are dealing with can exist without having issues, without having disagreements, and without periodically needing to change its focus and attitudes. What I hope to have done with this document is to bring some of these issues to the forefront of people's minds, and to hopefully have uncovered some issues that people, including myself, had previously not been aware existed.
     I don't mean to preach with this manifesto. I don't know everything, and I don't have all the answers. This was an introspective document, a means to dig deeper than most people take the time to do by using the power of a structured argument. In fact, while writing some of this, I was either in a hurry, or tired, or even didn't go deep enough in some cases, so there very well could be flaws within this document.
     But my intention was not to make this manifesto perfect. My intentions were merely to spur thought and debate, to encourage some people to look a little deeper into their experience beyond what's immediately thrust before their eyes, and hopefully to cultivate further ideas and action. If even one person comes away from reading this and does something amazing, then the time it took to write this was well spent, even if it is six months, or even two years down the line.
     It may seem like I've spent a lot of time writing this, but really I probably spent less time writing this than most of you spend animating even one clock movie. For most of these I came up with the topics, gave myself a few days to think about it subconsciously while I was working on other things, and then just sat down and started typing to see what came up (most sections only took about an hour of typing, apiece, so this whole thing only took about 10-12 hours). It's the first time I tried this process, and I'm so impressed with the results that I think I will start to do this with more universal themes in the future. It's a pretty amazing process, and I highly recommend you guys try it sometime.
     If you read this document all the way to this point, you really do care about this community (or you're incredibly bored), and I'm glad to have you around. I look forward to seeing a lot more funny, exciting, and thoughtful works from all of you.
     
     
     
     While I was in the process of writing this document, LeekClock apparently had similar ideas to me in mind, and drafted up a concise Clock Crew Charter, a brilliant move that had not occurred to me. The charter is simple, elegant, and does indeed provide a guide for how a Clock should behave. That having been said, it is in its early stages, and will probably need several drafts in the future to more accurately reflect what a clock should strive to do, and it still doesn't really go into too much discussion as to how the Clock Crew has come about the way it has and why these principles are good principles (although intuitively, they do appear to be good principles). I am eager to see how the charter will affect the attitudes and productivity of the clocks. I have high hopes for it, myself, but I won't let that dissuade me from taking this approach to compliment his actions.