@Agami
Your psychological assessment is fundamentally flawed, though, because you've started with an invalid supposition.
We
hbarcellos throws his lot in with the Amiga people. He is not asking 'Why do I?' or 'Why do you?', his asking why this tribe of ours, why we as a group?
This is completely invalid.
Amiga users are not a single user, group or "tribe" as you put it. We are not all as one. We each have our own reasons and purposes.
As an example, to use your analogy of a tribe:
Imagine a tribe in the Amazon rain forest.
Imagine there are two particular people in the tribe that we shall focus on. Let's - for the sake of argument - call them Fred and Barney.
Fred is the hunter gatherer of the tribe. His job is to go out and kill animals for food for the tribe. He does this well. He is a great hunter.
Barney is the tribe's elder. He does not need to do anything. Yet they both go out hunting.
Obviously we can see that both Fred and Barney both have different motives for doing the same thing. Fred has to - Barney does it too, but why does Barney do it?
What you're saying is that Amiga people are all in a group, all have the same objective, and therefore all have the same psychological reasoning behind them, but this is a fallacy, and it's one around which you have built your whole hypothesis.
In our fictional Amazonian tribe, does Barney do it out of necessity? No. Does he do it out of love of hunting? Or nostalgia because he used to be the hunter-gatherer of the tribe? Or does he like hanging out with his mate Barney?
We don't know - we don't have enough information upon which to base our hypothesis. And in the same way, we do not know why each and every Amiga user uses an Amiga. To lump them all together is as absurd as saying every man dislikes shopping or every woman is partial to pink magnolias, or saying that Barney and Fred go hunting out of a common need, which is provably incorrect (as it's Fred's job, not Barney's).
You can't do that.
Keep Trying
Something done over and over. It's not a single attempt, it's not why try now, but rather the enduring tries and retries.
The definition of stupidity is to repeat the same action and expecting a different result. Over the decades we have made differing attempts but expected the same result i.e. the return of the Amiga as a viable platform. What do we call that?
Again, a
major fallacy in your presupposition.
You suppose that all Amiga users are doing the same thing to achieve the same result. This is
not the case.
We are not - as Amiga users - all doing the same action. We're not repeating our action. We're doing different things, all the time. Was porting Qt to AmigaOS4 the same as writing Hello World in 1989? Of course not!
We are not repeating the same action expecting a different result, because the result is as a consequence of the initiating action. If I write an application for AmigaOS4, I don't expect the Second Coming of the Almighty Jay Miner. I expect a working application. If I write a Hello Word program, I expect my computer to say "Hello World" at me.
Secondly, the result.
Again:
supposition.
You have stated that the end result of ALL AMIGA people is the return of the Amiga. This is provably and demonstrably
false.
We do not all carry out our actions to make the Amiga mainstream again. Many of us are happy to have it as a niche platform. What we are striving for is continuity. We are trying to make the Amiga survive, not overtake the competition as you incorrectly suggest.
If we want to port Qt to the Amiga, our aim is to facilitate porting of future programs of Qt, NOT to destroy Microsoft and Apple.
That is our action. That is our result. We have succeeded. We do not, as you invalidly suggest, continue repeating the same action over and over expecting the same result.
Cultivate
The essence of the question. It singles out those who are toiling in the proverbial fields. It does not include people who have been exposed to the Amiga recently, it's not about how my sisters played SuperFrog and liked it. They're not going around trying to get their friends to play the game. Memetically these individuals are infertile grounds. Just like none of us are cultivating the use of an abacus. We may find it interesting, and we may even discover some of its advantages for certain types of calculations, but in the end we go back to a digital calculator or a software facsimile thereof.
So the phrasing of the question implies a time period beyond the recent, an ongoing journey, a group behaviour, and the effort of cultivating specific ideas and ideals. Everywhere this kind of group behaviour is encountered the main driving emotion is always nostalgia. Physical books vs. digital books. Handwritten letters vs. email.
This is not a bad thing, only those of us lucky enough to be alive in the time of the Amiga can be nostalgic about it. And one day in the future when we've all 'kicked the bucket', people will be able to see an Amiga in a computer or technology museum, and perhaps read books about the passion some groups of people had towards some of the early computing platforms and no doubt see it as completely irrational.
So people who hand-write letters are being nostalgic? And it's not because they just might not own a computer?
People who read a book on paper instead of a computer are being nostalgic? Are you sure it's not just because many people don't like looking at screens for a long time? Or because taking your laptop into the bath isn't a good thing?
By the same argument you could say that in hindsight anybody enthusing about an obsolete technology is being irrational and "nostalgic", yet if you put yourself in that situation and look at the FACTS, you will that it can be anything but. There are provable demonstrable reasons as to why we as humans do what we do, nostalgia is but one possibility. Lumping all people in to fit one example which you have chosen, and thereby extrapolating for the whole group, is the worst psychology imaginable. It's manipulating the evidence to fit the theory, rather than fitting the theory to the evidence in front of you. By the same token you could find a field of sheep with one black sheep in it, take a sample of one sheep as to which sheep are black, pick the black sheep and extrapolate it to say that the whole field of sheep are black.
We - as Amiga users - are not one person.
We do not share a common goal.
Nobody can tell me what my goal is. My goal is determined by me and me alone.
My reasons for my continuing towards my goal are my own, and mine alone.
It may not fit in with psychological mass grouping as you're advocating, but like it or not:
I am an individual. Remember that when you fit me into your mass group of 1000 people because it allows you to put a label on me.
(Incidentally: in case you're thinking I'm being defensive, you're right. I hate it when people generalise me with other people, more so when they've never met me. It's a pet hate of mine
)
