One of the first places I think of going when I want to see screenshots of a game I am interested in is Gamespot. Unfortunately the experience has never been good and as the web has advanced the image viewer on the site is looking worse and worse. Why is there no image viewer that lets you cycle through images without reloading the page? This has become a pretty standard feature on the internet.

The only reason that I can think of for maintaining the status quo is that you get a lot more page loads and therefore more unique ad views with the current system. That is a poor reason to keep things as they are. Viewing screenshots is frustrating and if anything, I think worse of the advertisers that are getting in the way of my being able to accomplish what I want, which is to browse through screenshots. There is nothing worse than clicking next over and over to quickly scan through the screenshots and having the next button keep moving on you because the page loads and then the ad loads and pushes everything on the page down. I would hate to be the advertiser that has the banner at the top of the page that keeps getting clicked by accident because it loads into view just as someone is trying to click a button that has slid down the page a ways. That advertiser is paying for a click through and is garnering negative feelings from the people clicking their ad which is the exact opposite of what they want to be paying for.

The current system looks very dated, provides a poor user experience, and does your advetisers a disservice by turning users against them for the hassle that their ads and the pursuit of ad revenue are creating for users. The ads on most of the site are also generally ugly and poorly integrated into the site.

If their is one thing I despise on the internet it is standardized banner ads: they are never quite the right size to fit with most page layouts, they are often ugly or gaudy or distracting, and they are usually about stuff that I am not interested in. Advertising on the internet could be really interesting and engaging and beautifully designed to fit with the content that it is intermingled with but generally speaking it isn't. It's even worse on mobile where the standard banner sizes often leave akward looking whitespaces and don't line up well with anything.

hoop_hard:  I hear you.  Your post made perfect sense to me; I have been through the same kind of thing recently.  It does take time and it is painful.

There is someone out there for you but I don't believe that there is any one person that has been pre-selected to be tho only one.  Unless fate has somehow pre-determined all the choices you will make in your life what are the chances that you and the one you are meant for will ever meet in this world of 3 billion plus people?  I am quite certain we make our choices for ourselves, and as such there are any number of decisions in a day that affect the people we find around us.  Maybe she could have been the one, but circumstances as they are, that is not currently the case.  Don't worry that you have missed your only chance at happiness because I am certain your life is still full of possibilities.  While your feelings for her may never change, you can still have feelings for someone else that are just as deep or deeper, even if the feeling isn't quite the same.  In fact I hope the feeling isn't the same.  I hope the feeling is as unique as the women that becomes the focus of your affection and love; life will be all the richer for it.

If you want something to read that might be of further help check out C.S. Lewis' "The Four Loves".  I found it to be very helpful.  There are a lot of christian references in the book (it is C.S. Lewis after all), but even if you don't share his beliefs I think it is still full of ideas that can be universally understood and appreciated for their insight into human love.