The Future of the Downs

[the guy who be short]

Originally Posted by TGWBS

I predict: The phantom edits the above post to stop it looking like a list thread.

Sort of. It half came true, then!

Originally Posted by Lhuna

We'll see page after page of eleven green boxes in the Member List.

We already have one whole page, so half true.

Originally Posted by Lhuna

As for the near future...HI will be back, along with Mrs. Istarion.

One more point for Lhuna.

Originally Posted by TGWBS

I predict people will click the link in my siggy and decide they want to learn Quenya to better understand Tolkien.

And one for me... see a pattern emerging?

Originally Posted by Eomer of the Rohirrim

Over the next four years SamwiseGamgee and myself will slowly drag The Warg and Warg Rider Appreciation Thread onto an 11th page.

New blood.

Originally Posted by TGWBS

Some men will volunteer to learn Quenya.

I'm winning...

Originally Posted by Fea

Eventually, there will come a time that Eomer of the Rohirrim shall live until the end of a game of WW

And he was a wolf... grr...

Originally Posted by Estel

I better add a prediction onto this: Some day I will play in another WW game.

As a cobbler... sigh.

Originally Posted by Lhuna

I predict that in some future Werewolf game, Eomer will no longer be an ordinary villager.

Lhuna catching up!

Originally Posted by TGWBS

Tgwbs's BDer dreams will start coming back...

The werewolf ones are scary...

Originally Posted by spawn

Werewolvers will start using "Werewolf" as a verb.

Strange how most of the predictions that came true are Werewolf-related.

Originally Posted by Lhuna

There would be so much Werewolf games that a BDer unfortunate enough to be a Seer so many times will eventually have real life dreams regarding the players' roles.

You forgot the Mods, though.

Originally Posted by Nilp

the phantom will realise that this:

You will curse the day you did not do
All that the phantom asked of you.

fits him well, and will turn it into his sig.

Perhaps Sight runs in the family?

Originally Posted by TGWBS

Fordim Hedgethistle will create more polls.

Well, alrgiht, that one was obvious. I won't give myself points for that.

Originally Posted by TGWBS

The phantom will take one look at the reps thread and figure it out.

TGWBS - 4.5 predictions.
Lhuna - 3.5 predictions.
Eomer, Fea, Estel, spawn, Nilp - 1 each.

I hereby appoint myself High Seer of the Downs. Lhuna shall be my UnderSeer, the other five shall be our apprentices...

[Nilpaurion Felagund]

mr. short, could I decline the role of apprentice? My "Sight" just came from a really creepy eye technique and its ability to hypnotise.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I want to be on that list of accurate predictions! ... I predict that this topic will move onto a Fourth page! Hay I did it!

Okay, back to (possible) reality...

I think that eventually people will return to Barrowdowns.com and start asking Lord Wight to add more themes and make new games as well as updating the barrow comics.

[Durelin]

The Barrow Wight will be knighted for creating The Barrow-Downs.

[the guy who be short]

Hmm, mutinous UnderSeer? Rebellious apprentices? The Seer establishment is crumbling around me...

There will be a game of werewolf in which everybody is a werewolf, werebear, werehamster, wereduck or some other werecritter.

[Gil-Galad]

The new game of Werewolf, Village of Werewolves!

there are werewolves tryingto survive the villagers that are hunting them! a total twist that fails... Were-The Barrow Wight

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

Originally Posted by Gil-Galad

The new game of Werewolf, Village of Werewolves!

there are werewolves tryingto survive the villagers that are hunting them! a total twist that fails... Were-The Barrow Wight

Actually...

Fea ponders for a moment.

That's a neat idea. I wonder if we could make it work.

[Gil-Galad]

we could try, though we can't say it would suceed

[the guy who be short]

The love lives of the BDers will get so intricately complex that not even the phantom will be able to comprehend it all.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

2008: The site is sued by the Tolkien Estate when it becomes clear that the entire Tolkien corpus can be compiled from quotations in The Books. The site is defended by a terrifying alliance of members from the legal profession, and as a side effect the Downs comes to own the rights to every word Tolkien ever wrote. Mithadan's ruthless enforcement of these rights leads to most of the English language becoming unusable for commercial purposes. It is replaced in television adverts by an obscure dialect of Swahili.

2010: A new forum is opened in which students may study for a Barrow degree in Tolkien Studies. Eventually this eclipses all of the world's major universities, to the extent that all of the most respected academics are employed by the Barrow-Wight. Oxford and Cambridge vie in a contest of forged documents as each attempts to prove that it set up the site in the first place.

2013: The Downs is awarded nihil obstat status by the Pope.

2015: Owing to a mix-up at the printer's, the fortieth Harry Potter book consists of two days' worth of logs from the chat room. It is nominated for the Booker Prize, but defeated by Green Thoughts in the Heliotropic Spiral by Eustacia Psmyth. The number of Downs members accessing the site in a single hour exceeds the latter's entire readership elevenfold.

2018: The Re-unification of the Entish Bow finally reaches its conclusion. Owing to the philosophical depth of its closing posts, it forms the basis of a new religion, which is the first to exist only on the Internet. The chief prophet of this cult is Vogonwë Brownbark, and the liturgy consists entirely of rambling doggerel, the commission for writing which makes Diamond18 the richest Downer in history. The entire writing team is excommunicated, and nihil obstat revoked. The site's member list exceeds the length of the electoral roll of Greater London within a month.

2019: The canonicity debate spreads beyond the forum and causes an uprising in Derbyshire and civil war in Switzerland. Eventually the entire world puts aside every other difference in favour of either the reader's opinion or the author's intent. The resultant conflict causes the destruction of several major cities, the collapse of the United Nations and a slight lag in the chat room.

2021: The Best Avatar thread is made into a feature film. It breaks all previous records, but is accused of dumbing down the original by many members.

2030: Sharkû is appointed Professor of Comparative Germanic Philology at the Sorbonne. For some reason he begins to write at least thirty posts a day, and rapidly accumulates the largest count of any member.

2033: The Downs declares its independence from the World Wide Web and becomes the world's first virtual state. Citizens of the Barrow-Downs cease to be subject to the laws of their own countries and instead are required only to observe the forum regulations. A dot-matrix print-out of these becomes the basis of a constitution so convoluted and riddled with inherently contradictory amendments that the word 'Byzantine' is supplanted by 'Downsian' in common English usage.

2525: (if Man is still alive), the discovery of some long-lost back-up discs throws new light on the social history of the early twenty-first century. In particular, Middle-earth Mirth is interpreted as a single composition: an extended post-modernist allegory of the chaos of human existence. It becomes a standard text in the study of English literature, but eventually is dropped from the syllabus when twenty-first-century English is deemed too challenging for undergraduates.
By this time, the English of the forum is studied as a foreign language. The official academic standard has become what we term 'chat-speak', with all SMS abbreviations and most of 1337 having been absorbed into everyday speech. The forum records are well known among senior academics, and are hotly debated in philological journals. One of the most contentious issues is the meaning of Estelyn's personal title.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

2013: The Downs is awarded nihil obstat status by the Pope.

But only because,

2012: The Barrow Wight is made Pope.

[Boromir88]

Ok, I've finally have had a vision of what will happen to the downs...

Lalwende and davem will join forces and be a Reputations monopoly, forcing all of us underlings to go out of business and enslave us only to work to their benefit to get more reps. Then one will betray the other and control everything.

[Orominuialwen]

9/22/07
It was discovered today that The Phantom Who Be Short hoax was entirely perpetrated by one Hookbill the Goomba. Mr. Goomba, aged 19, who resides in an unspecified location in Britain reportedly confessed to a Barrow-Downs Tribune reporter today that he was the one behind the entire hoax.

"It was a natural next step for me," he is quoted as saying. "For years I'd been altering photos with Photoshop as a source of entertainment for myself and others. After such smash hits as Tol-in-Gaurhoth: The Movie and The Barrow-Wight's book for sale on Amaz.co.uk, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to capitalise on the phantom-Fea rumors. I first contacted the pair, to see if they were interested, then when they said they were, I created the image. The scandal created by its release has been immense fun, but right now I think I'm just going to go back to the quiet life coming up with Crazy Captions."

The Barrow-Wight could not be reached for comment on this new development, but a press conference is expected from him before the end of the week. A Barrow-Downs moderator, who spoke on condition of anonymity denied rumors that The Barrow-Wight was contemplating retirement in light of recent events.

"His Wightlyness has no intention of leaving his post as head of The Barrow-Downs. He has not suffered a nervous breakdown from this scandal, and he has not died and been replaced by a body double. Honestly, I don't know where you people get these ideas," the moderator told the Tribune.

[Lhunardawen]

tgwbs is trying to associate himself with me. And since I am obviously innocent, I think he may be a werewolf pretending to be the Seer. Thus, my vote:

++THE GUY WHO BE SHORT

[Hookbill the Goomba]

Oromin, I actually use Microsoft Image Composer!

[Ainaserkewen]

Aina will once again be a fully functioning and active member of this website...

I'm working on it...

Oh, in 10-15 years some young downer will realise the overall error of the Peter Jackson movies and another set of movie adaptations will immerge totally rejuvenating the Movies forum and bringing hoards of freckle-faced ragscallions to the site.

[Bergil]

somebody's going to confuse me with gil-galad. He wil be yelled at by both of us.

[Gil-Galad]

Originally Posted by Bergil

somebody's going to confuse me with gil-galad. He wil be yelled at by both of us.

aba-butta? thats all i got...

[Glirdan]

I predict that I will eventually understnad Gil. The likeliness of that happening is slim to none.

[Ainaserkewen]

Originally Posted by Glirdan

I predict that I will eventually understnad Gil. The likeliness of that happening is slim to none.

Are you kidding? I understand him perfectly. In fact, I predict that out of everyone's frustration of not understanding him, I shall write a dictionary that will make millions.

...ahem. But I digress.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

Too much chat, too little genuine content and humour. Back on topic, please!