Tikatu's Travels Through Time

I was rather hoping I’d go on doing a drabble a day until the start of NaNo, but something came up today that brought the drabble train to a screeching halt in favor of my novel. I’ll talk about it in a moment, but first, a recap of the whole drabble a day experience.

Writing time frame: September 16th through 28th.

Posting time frame: September 17th through 30th

Total writing time: 13 days

Days missed: 1, leaving 12 writing days

Drabbles written: 15, plus an alternate ending for one. Only one of these I thought was sub-par.

Drabbles posted: 14 as of today.

So, it was pretty good. I only missed one day of writing and the rest saw one or more written.

As a Fan History admin, I’ve been involved in editing the Russet Noon article, and have been talking with my family about the whole phenomenon – mostly about the copyright issues and the Peter David connection - through his satirical round-robin, Potato Moon. (Peter David is a household word of sorts as my husband remembers his work as a comic book writer, and we have some of his Star Trek novels, too.)

So, today the Girl, a Twilight fan, having heard from me about the latest brouhaha surrounding Lady Sybilla and Russet Noon (i.e. the press release), wanted to see the russetnoon.com website and see for herself what the fuss was all about. I pulled it up, vacated my chair, and went off to cook bacon for tonight’s supper.

I hadn’t finished frying the first few slices when my daughter came out to the kitchen, her hands balled up and an expression on her face that made her look as if she had been sucking limes (she’s rather fond of lemons).

“Ewwwwww!” she cried.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s that site! She (meaning Lady Sybilla) has Renesmee all wrong! Renesmee is a self-assured little girl at the end of Breaking Dawn. I don’t see why that should change!”

She shook her head. “I love Renesmee and Jacob to pieces, but if this is from Jacob’s point-of-view, why is it so much about Renesmee? It looks as if the whole book will be about her. And it sounds like she’s approaching Canon-Sue land.”

No sooner had she gone back into the living room, than her next youngest brother (also known as Boy #1, and also a Twilight fan) came in. His fists were balled up and he moved them like Wallace would – but instead of a look of delight on his face (as Wallace would have), he too looked as if he’d been sucking sour fruit – lemons, in his case.

“Ewwwwww!” he said, much as his sister had done. “This Russet Noon thing – it’s like combining sugar and honey in a bowl, then adding it to a combination of margarine, brown sugar and marshmallows in a saucepan. Then adding in some maple syrup and molasses, and dipping a sheet of paper in it and trying to read what is written on it.”

My son loves to cook, and experiment in the kitchen; honey is one of his favorite ingredients. He’d just used it in a loaf of fruit bread and it stuck the loaf to the pan. So I got his drift. He ended his impromptu recipe with, "Renesmee is not bored, and I sincerely doubt she has inadequacy issues.” (Yes, we talk like that in my house.)

I asked my youngest son if he’d read Twilight, and he said no. So, no comment from him.

Going by my own kids’ reaction, I’d say that Lady Sybilla doesn’t exactly have a hit on her hands – should she get past the copyright lawyers unscathed.

I've been blogging about the pending demise of MSN Groups, and some about the replacements - most specifically Multiply and Windows Live Groups. Multiply because it is the chosen replacement for MSN Groups, and Windows Live Groups since it is Microsoft's own answer to MSN groups.

So far nothing has come close to the versatility and ease of use that MSN Groups has had.

Nothing.

No other service allowed for custom webpages, for custom logos and buttons and separated messageboards. Nothing was as easy to use as MSN Groups. Just fill out the forms and bingo! You're good to go. The webpage interface wasn't exactly WYSIWYG, but it was close and allowed for far more colors than Windows Live Groups allows for (in fact, WLG doesn't give you background colors for your discussion pages, which is the only place you can use HTML. Pretty much the same for Multiply.) You could easily hide pages, rearrange pages, add new albums, use the pictures from those albums in other spots... the learning curve was as shallow or steep as you wanted it to be. It accommodated both the novice webmaster and the more experienced. It was a great starting place for fandom groups; and a lot of fandoms were represented there.

What will happen to those many fandom groups? Well, some of them will be lost forever come February because their owners just sort of abandoned them to the spammers before this point. There's at least one Thunderbirds group I know of that falls into this category. It has a lot of interesting fanfic on it, but the owner has grown beyond it and has left it for the "lonely singles" spammers to keep it active (otherwise, it would have been deleted years ago). Some groups will migrate to Multiply, some to Geocities, some to Windows Live Groups... they'll be scattered all over, and harder to find. The close-knit communities that had developed over the years will be broken up, never to truly be reclaimed again. A lot of interesting and unique fandom creations will disappear forever. I've already had that happen once to me; the thought of it happening again makes me sick.

Is there a perfect solution to this forced diaspora? Not really. If you want to have the same flexibility as MSN Groups has, you've got to create your own website, and very likely, you'll have to pay for it. And if you want to continue having a free site, you'll have to pay in other ways, with intrusive ads or with a loss of those features you've become accustomed to.  (Yes, MSN Groups has ads, but because of their placement, they are ignorable.)

As a side issue, I've been poking around the Windows Live team blogs for the past few days, and I noticed that they're not asking for feedback on WLG. Everything else, yes. Windows Live Groups, no. I think they know what kind of response they'd get there: a very angry one from a large group of disgruntled MSN Group owners.

So, we're losing a piece of fandom property. What's to go next?

ETA: I'm also aware that AOL is/was dumping their Groups. So there are more fandom communities disappearing. Let's hope that Yahoo doesn't join the pack.