rivercrow

“Type Distribution,” yeah, right….

The value of forum-based arguments.

One of the funny things about managing a forum is watching the length of time people spend replying to a thread. Some people will hang on there for fifteen minutes or better, crafting a response that ultimately has the same importance as choosing to put the right shoe on before the left shoe.

The cycle of rebirth extends even to the electronic world.
Forums rise from their own ashes, sometimes growing through their pains, sometimes repeating the pains. The staff may change, the faces change, the names change–or not. No matter. The cycle continues.

I keep having discussions about communities…specifically online communities. (If you’re in my immediate circle, you’re tired of hearing this, but don’t let that put you off!)
People join together to discuss common interests. Or people fall into crowds and end up accidentally engaged in conversations. It becomes a story of its own (like this one here) […]

I was cleaning out some of my bookmarks and came across the final installment of Queen of Wands. I’m not certain why I’ve hung on to it. I’m not even sure when I bookmarked it–there have been so many endings and beginnings in the last few years for me.
Elsewhere I posted links to just the […]

Communities gather and disperse. This is inevitable, an organic law of Brownian movement.
The original dispossessed had forgotten or overlooked the other communities that preceded them, communities bound by dial-up bulletin board systems and older communities connected by ink and paper.
Each generation of dispossessed forgot or overlooked the previous. Each glowered down at the newly-emergent.

Elders, leaders, […]

The forums grew.
Fragments from some merged with fragments of others. Across the wide, black plain of the Internet glinted the lights of the various communities of the dispossessed.
Mosaics rearranged themselves or were rearranged. Restructuring happened forcibly or accidentally or deliberately. Mosaics grew in bursts, slowly or quickly.
Survival was not guaranteed.

Lights blanked out suddenly, perhaps […]