AKA being a "Serial" Gaian versus an "Archive" Gaian.
In reading, both books and webcomics, "Serial" means that you keep up with an ongoing story or comic as it's being updated. This also means learning of the stuff that influences an update and any changes that may follow. "Archive," on the other hand, means that you're reading stuff that has long since updated and are reading through, well, the archives. As a result, the context of certain stuff is lost on an archive reader while a serial reader may remember them fondly. All archive readers do eventually become serial readers, but that's not my point.
My point is that Gaia sure has a lot of items based on the stuff outside Gaia that then influenced them.
One example were the relatively recently-added new poses for the Cig. A long time ago, all you had was a pose for hands, a pose where it hung on your lip, and one where it was in your mouth. A very simple item. Now it has a lot of other poses, all thanks to the Anti-Cig Ban Protests. On the other hand, Fremere's Guard's "bonus poses" are highly influenced by events that happened within Gaia as the item evolved, such as Sasha gaining new shop art and complaints of her being "skinny," the complaints of too many RIG items and too many companion poses, and of course, GCD McSourface. The item containing Johnny's photo contains a lot of treasured memories for us, and Gaia-tan's visage brings out nostalgia in a lot of us. Also going back to Fremere's Guard, it poked at another item evolving in its lifetime, Anima Adamantea, and an artist's rendition of Fremere and Reiko even proved that they were together at some point!
But to someone fresh and new to the site, a lot of these old references, shout outs, hand waves...they all go over his naive head. What to do when you're surrounded by things you don't understand?
The only logical conclusion.
In respect to your join date...are you an archive or a serial Gaian? When did you become "serial," that is, you caught up with all the major happening on this site?