Over the last few months I have been reading Lex a bed time story every night consisting of a chapter from Frank Baum’s Land of Oz books. The first thing Xie said when I told her that I wanted to work through these books with him was “There is more then one?”. It seems that there are quite a few people that think the story begins and ends with “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. Obviously this is not the case.

Baum composed a total of 20 books to the series and it was then picked up by other writers after him. I’m not sure if we will go into the books by other author’s (which canonically add another 20 for a total of 40 books), but currently we are at book seven.  Some of the books are great – others it seemed Baum was just “phoning it in”.  So when you are starting the next book, you can’t be sure of the quality you are getting into. Though I have a feeling over my life I’ll be reading these again. Lex is still at the stage where he is listening to my voice, but not really paying attention to the story yet. So when he is I’m expecting to have to go through all of these again.

I got into the Oz books when I was around 9 or 10.  I used to check them out of the Amherst public library and just devour them (hence why I was aware of the series).   I doubt I ever read them in order, I never read any not written by Baum, and I’m positive that I did not read all the books that he wrote.  I loved reading them regardless.

Working through the thought process I take that back – I didn’t read any other canonical books by other Authors.   I did have a science fiction-esque book that took place in Oz. It was titled “A Barnstormer in Oz”- my parents bought it for me when I requested to pick it up when I saw it sitting at a Big and Small Lots store.   I got it home and low and behold the story it told.   Well really I can’t tell you the story since I don’t really remember it, but there was nudity and sex in the book.  This was one of those cases where the child never tells the parents what the book really contained.

My parents bought be Wizard of Oz smut and never realized it.  You can’t blame them, it would be the same as if I bought Alexander a Harry Potter spin-off book in a few years and never read it myself.   You would go, oh Harry Potter – go ahead kid knock yourself out.   All and all I don’t think it was all that graphic – but it was graphic enough to shock a ten or eleven year old reading it.  Somewhere around the time I went to college the book disappeared from my possession.  It is just as well, it’s not one of the book’s I plan on reading to Lex anyway.

Most nights we get through a single chapter – some nights he falls asleep quickly so I don’t finish the chapter, other nights he is bouncing around and refusing to sleep so we get through two or three chapters.  This is done every weeknight after his bath and before my dinner. He get’s top priority, so every night we have the routine down to maximize my time with him.  Get home, feed him, play for a little bit, give him a bath, and then read to him until he is passed out.  All in all, it’s not a bad routine.

I’m hoping to do a blog write up on each of the books, ideally I was going to do a write up as I finished each of them.  Doing the math of not a single write up so far, and the fact I am on the seventh book – that doesn’t seem to have happened.   This isn’t something that is alone related to the Oz books – I’ve finished a few other books this year that I wanted to do write ups on but haven’t yet had a chance.   Life the universe and everything like that.   Hopefully soon these will get written, published, read, and commented on – or more then likely ignored.

Until then I hope you all have a pleasant journey with me as I travel down the yellow brick road one chapter at a time.

I don’t have too many face shots that are taken head on enough for this to work – so the one I used was about as good as it was going to get. The one of Lex was one I considered the most elf like. Enjoy!

Just cause I have pants on my head doesn’t mean I don’t want any candy!!!!

Just a bad iphone picture from today that I thought I would share.

Actually this video is a few months old, but I haven’t posted it. This all started when I was mock throwing a shirt at Lex, and he found it funny. It led to one of his first laughing fits. Enjoy.

Some people think I am joking when I say that playing at home upsets the baby. Let this video be proof for the rest of you.

I was in a meeting at work and around 3:45 a call came into my cell phone.   Since the meeting was ending soon I didn’t even look at the call and sent it straight to voice mail.  As I left the meeting a few minutes later I walked out and saw it was Xie calling me.  I called her as I was walking back to the car.   Her mother had her and she was on the way to the hospital.  I rushed back to my office and rushed through everything I had to get done, get the paperwork filed for the maternity leave I was taking and try to rush out there.   Now my hiring company (I’m a contractor) was in town preparing for the following week to do performance reviews – while I was waiting for my boss to show back up they rushed me through my review.   My boss finally appeared and I rushed him through what needed to be known and done, and had the paperwork signed.   Thirty minutes after talking to Xie I was on the road to home. My commute was an hour, then another half hour to the hospital.

When I got home I rushed taking out and feeding the pets since I wouldn’t be coming back that night.  I also grabbed everything Xie and I needed, but she didn’t take with her.   While the dogs were eating I managed to get out the announcement on the blog that we were heading to the hospital and things were happening.  I had actually written that a couple weeks before but had it ready in preparation so that took only a few seconds to get it marked as published.  Everything said and done, I was at the hospital about two hours after Xie.

When I arrived she was in a staging area, where they get you ready to have a baby.   A room where you are not far enough along to move into the next room.   They had her on medications, but she was still feeling quite a bit of pain.  Her mother was there comforting her and feeding her ice chips, essentially wrangling it so I couldn’t get in at all.   Now I have stated that I may not always be the most comforting person in the world, but I didn’t have a chance.   At one point Xie interjected and pleaded with me to talk to her.   Now I’m normally a guy with too many words and would just keep talking about anything and everything, but I blanked – and felt like total crap over it.

Continued in part 4 coming soon

My father, what do I say.   I love the man to death, but for me he wasn’t the perfect father, but neither was I the perfect son.   I can say now that he is one of the closest family members I have.   Part of that is my nature, part of it is the relationship we strengthened when I was traveling on the road and my dad and I had many hours of long conversation.   Either way we have a great relationship now.

Though he will say otherwise, I’m not exactly the child he wanted.   I wouldn’t worry too much about that though, my son could easily turn into a mustang driving jock, very far the opposite side of me.   I’m sure I’ll have to deal with the same problems my father did; not understanding the time period, not understanding what I was going through in school, and not understanding me.   Part of this is par for the course of being the oldest child, and part of it was the differences that sprung up in interest.   My father collected alot of books growing up and said he enjoyed reading, I would say this is one thing we have in common over the long course of years.    The problem is I don’t ever remember my father reading a book.

If we set aside some of the truly negative memories we can focus on some of the more interesting memories:

• My father forcing me to do practice with the Greenville HS swim team when I was 12 because I was swimming circles at swim class of those my own age
• Driving home in one of my father’s work beater cars that he went through that had holes in the floor boards and you could see the ground
• My father taking us to my grandfather’s in Greenville every year and taking us out for Maid-Rites
• Taking my brother
• Teaching me to play Chess at age nine (and my brother learned also when he was 4)
• Setting up a swing in the garage, until a neighbor girl fell off it and smacked her head
• Sneaking change from his dresser some my brother and I could sneak up to Convenient and buy candy
• Building us a clubhouse, that eventually was vandalized and was burned down
• Building us snow forts in the mounds of snow left behind by snow plows
• Picking me up from the police station when I was busted for shoplifting at age 14
• For being there later in life when I needed him

For being a decent father to a rotten son ;P I can say he did an ok job.  He taught me to take acceptance of the consequences of my actions, that I need to be my person.  That I can do things my way, and as long as I was making forward progress he wouldn’t stand in my way or get mad.  While I didn’t see it growing up, I can look back and say my father made me a better man.

Happy Father’s Day Dad.

Xie and I had been anti-kids our whole relationship.   Well, anti-kids is pretty strong.  We will leave it at the fact that we had no plans to ever have any children.  Even after the ectopic pregnancy we didn’t have any plans.  It was something that if it happened we would handle it, if it didn’t we wouldn’t feel that we were lacking anything in our lives.  So when we found out Xie was pregnant again, six months after the ectopic pregnancy we were a bit surprised.   Keep in mind that up until 2007 Xie had never been pregnant – so we assumed that it wouldn’t happen.   So within eight months she had been pregnant twice.

After what we went through six months prior we still waited a couple months before telling any family.  We didn’t know what to expect or if we were going to have a repeat.  Well eventually we passed the information across the family.  It also shows that even though I don’t speak to my mother, some news passes across borders.  I told my father and then the next day drove up north to tell my grandmother, well they feigned surprise – but I found out from my sister who I visited after leaving their house that they already knew.   I confronted them on the subterfuge, but they said they didn’t want ot ruin it for us.  Welcome to the back channels and gossip that runs in the back current of my family that no one wants to admit occurs.

During the pregnancy mostly things went normal.  There was a couple concerns the first and one that still exists is that he had a multi-cystic non functioning kidney.   So essentially today he only has one kidney.   This is something that they have only been tracking in the last few years, and one in every 750 births there is instance of a child being born with only one functional kidney.  My sister through different circumstances has had a single her whole life, and things have been normal for her.   I don’t anticipate it effecting my son’s quality of life too much with the exception of what sports he can be involved with.

The other issue was that a couple of tubes in the cranial cavity were enlarged that could lead to learning disabilities in life.   This test was reversed on the next and subsequent visits.   So this is really a null issue, but something we dealt with.   One thing they kept trying to pressure to get done was the test for Down’s Syndrome.  It’s not covered by insurance and unless abortion is an option for you if it comes back positive (which wasn’t for us) it’s completely useless.   Every doctor visit where I went along they kept trying to push it.   The thing with this test is that there is nothing they can do one way or the other, it’s just to be informed.  I guess there are just somethings we were willing to leave to surprise.  Xie had to hold appointments at two different doctors and at the end of pregnancy was going to one or both every week.

Depending on who you asked the baby was due either February 16th or 18th.  We had bags packed and procedures in place.   Xie even bought a new (used) car on February 23rd in preparation.   We were getting ready to start planning to have the baby induced when I got a call on Thursday February 26th….

Continued in part 3 coming next week.

The birth of my son, it’s something I haven’t explicitly written about, until now.   It’s been almost four months and it’s now of those thing that you experience and you wonder how can I write about this.   It’s also one of those things when your someone who shares so much about yourself online you say how can you not.  Not writing about yet has put a writing anchor around my neck where I haven’t known where to go or what to write.  It is a roadblock to getting other writing done.  It’s an emotional roller coaster that of course goes back to the beginning, which is further back then some of you know already.  I guess it’s best to start at the beginning and see where it goes.

This journey started back in 2007.  Sometime around the August/September time frame we found out that Xie was pregnant.  Then a week or two later we were told she went through a miscarriage.   This was a back and forth thing of the doctor’s stating one thing and then back tracking later.   On October 31st 2007 I got a call at work from Xie that she was being taken to the hospital.   What had happened is that she was going through an ectopic pregnancy.  What this means is that fetus had started to form inside the tubes instead of the uterus.   They had to perform surgery to make sure that she would survive.  Unfortunately there was no possible to save the fetus.

My family only found out about the pregnancy at all because I called my grandparents and my father to tell them what was going on since the doctor’s had told Xie that she had to have the operation that day or things could get dire.   I wanted my support channels in place without a surprise about why she was in the hospital.   Originally you think when someone is pregnant you don’t tell the whole family immediately, we didn’t.   When we thought she had a miscarriage that there wasn’t a need for them to know.   However it got down to crunch time with the hospital visit.  That night the surgery essentially saved Xie’s life, but yet took the life of our possible first child.

I took it hard, and Xie took it hard.   I had been down this road once before.  In college within two days of each other, two different girls told me they were pregnant.  A month or two down the road, with different circumstances they both had miscarriages.  While politically I am pro-choice, I wouldn’t choose abortion for my own child.  So whether this was teenage girls saying one thing to get their way, or if they were actually pregnant – it doesn’t matter.  In the end from someone who has to side with the truth, even though facts and situations may skewer the truth differently – emotionally I lost two children that year.  With the ectopic pregnancy I lost a third.

They assured us that even with one tube that many people can still have a baby and it things could go completely normal.  Xie stayed up and cried that night.  Partly from sadness, partly from hormones, and partly from what-ifs.   I cried with her.  I comforted her the best that I could.  I’m not always the most emotionally there person at all times, and that frustrates Xie. We made it through it though.   In the end we left the hospital with a one inch high teddy bear that they gave her.  We still have this and it sits on our shelf.

Continued in part 2 coming tomorrow.

Picture from here

A few months ago I lost all of my MP3′s that I had been accumulating for over 10 years.  It was a bad hard drive crash and over 200GB of music was lost in this tragedy.   One blessing of this is that we got to start from scratch.  Until a couple weeks I managed to keep putting off the long haul of going through hundreds of CDs to rerip them to MP3 so we can put them on our iPods and listen to our hearts content.

The problem with our previous collection is that there was no uniformity, the sources from the files were varied, the tags were a mess – so now we have a clean slate to work from.  Over the last two weeks I’ve been ripping CDs (and I’m amazed at how many “important” CDs we have lost).    I found one last night, so the ripping is not completely over – but on Friday night I managed to get through the bulk and any ones left are going to be onesy-twosy rips, which I can handle.  The new rule of the house is going to be, when a CD comes into the house it doesn’t get listened, it gets ripped and packed away.  An example of this is the new Green Day Album, I never listened to the physical CD at all, I did listen to it after I ripped it.

The problem on the outset was what size to rip them to.   Of course the discussion online focus on 192kbs for size up to 320 kbs for quality.   There is rampant discussions on whether someone can hear the difference of qualities so I did a test myself.   Between 192 kbs and 220 kbs I could tell a difference, so 192 kbs was out.   I then had Xie test between 220 kbs, 240 kbs, and 320 kbs.    She could tell the difference between 220 kbs and 240 kbs, but not 320.  So 240 kbs VBR was our baseline.

All of our MP3s now have proper tagging and album art embedded into the MP3, uniformity at last.   Now we have the other problem to go through.  What about non-CD media.   I’m still at a cross roads at that, I have cassette tapes (non-music and personal) that I want to save, plus we have a semi large (by today’s standards anyways) LP collection.   The LP’s I’ll probably borrow or buy CD versions of those to rip.   When I figure out how I want to do the cassettes I’ll let you know.

I have learned my lesson though, currently my MP3s are backed up on two different computers.  One is a “master” share and the other backup.   So I’m attempting to fight off a had drive dying again.

This post has multiple parts to it, so fair warning I’m guessing this one is going to be long.   Lately I’ve been more and more annoyed at traditional hard copy media.  It’s a pain in the butt to deal with and takes up way too much physical space (for those that know me you find that sentence greatly amusing).

Pictures

This started happening over the last year with photo albums.   Photo albums are terrible.   It means normally that one person has a copy of the image and you can’t share them.  It is essentially technology of the last generation.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a believer in having prints, but the pictures themselves.

I’ve made it my mission to start getting the family photos and scanning them in.   I’ve managed to get most of my father’s photos from the era he was with my mother.   The ones I’m missing are any he has of the kids hanging on the walls in his house.   My next run is going to be the pictures from his current family (so a good 15-16 years worth of pictures to go).

My grandmother on the other hand has been very tightfisted with her photos.  I can understand her being protective, but so far I’ve managed to get 59 photos out of her to scan (out of literally over a 1000-2000).   I have managed to scan my photo album, and more recently used the digital SLR and took pictures of my scrap book from high school.   So both of these can be tucked away in boxes that I don’t need to look at and take up physical space in my house.

All the photos I have are now uploaded to Flickr.   You can also read about my photo sharing issue with my mother over here.

Continued tomorrow in part 2

My mother left me a comment the yesterday (yes the mother I don’t talk to) about one of the baby pictures.   Her comment asked if I could send her an email with all the baby pictures we have.  Here is where we have the gap in the usage level between an older and the newer generation.   I remember years ago when everyone used to mail pictures around, but this was also a time where the pictures were normally 100kb or less in size.   Even then business environments were complaining about the pictures clogging up their email systems ( no matter that they were sending 300KB full HTML emails each time).  Now we fast forward to today.

People still routinely email pictures, but they are more apt to go look at them on Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, (insert social network of the week here).  We are more likely to send an URL link then to attach a photo.   It makes sense.   Now I could have just blown off my mother, but I gave her the first response that I have in over two years.   This does not mean I want to open a communication channel with her, it means that I responded to her comment the same way I would to any other commenter on the site. The important part of this excerpt is this:

Unfortunately I can’t – this isn’t because I’m being mean, this isn’t because we are not speaking and this is the only response you’ve gotten from me in two years. It’s because it is too unwieldy and impractical.

The last photo session I uploaded over 200 photos that were over 1.5 GB of total space. To give a comparison with my gmail account I have over 35000 emails (that are not spam) saved, this email only takes up 2.4 GB of space, since I save ALL of my outgoing email also just sending you pictures a few times would completely fill up my email box. There is a reason I use a photo sharing site, I could spend hours resizing photos just send them out to people who may or may not be interested to different degrees, but I always use the original size at home – so if a family member wants smaller sizes they can go to my Flickr account – which by the way has over 10GB of images (will probably pass 7000 images in a few weeks). There is a reason I actually pay for this service.

If want to read the rest of the comment which was a brief explanation of different options she could do on her part herself to be proactive, it’s on the comment section of this story.

What this means though is technology has fixed this issue, ironically the people that are most likely to use this technology to get pictures of their children or grandkids are still stuck in the old guard mentality of expecting things sent to them instead of going out and grabbing them.  If my sister had a picture out there I liked of her, I would go out and download it and archive it.  Most of the time I don’t make these pictures public, I save them as an archive for my child and any children he may have.    This is normal activity, for people my age and younger.   We don’t take dozens of prints at the Sears Studio and send it off to relatives still.

Some of us do, but that number is dwindling as you get to a younger and younger age of internet users.   How do I know they wouldn’t prefer a different shot than I would, I don’t.   That is the point they can take their own pictures they like and have them printed up – giving them back choice instead of forcing my tastes upon them.

So how do we move on from here?   I guess evolution will eventually take it’s course and utilizing the cloud will become the norm.   Maybe it doesn’t need a push in that direction.  I did finish my comment by giving my mother fairly explicit instructions on where to go………to handle getting the photos on her own, and on demand.

Now if only she would scan all of her photo albums (at a decent and high DPI level – ie should be 5-10mb per photo) so I could archive all those pictures I would be happy.  Granted not happy enough to go talk to her and get the photos and do it myself, but happier.   It’s tooth and nail to borrow pictures from my grandmother to scan in, but I’ve gotten some.  I have managed to scan all of my father’s photos from the pre-divorce of my parents era.   I need to get his after that images still.

I don’t want with my siblings over who gets what photographs once my parents and grand parents ass away (which is still hopefully decades and decades away), I would prefer to just have the digital copies, that way we could all have each photograph in the family history.   Maybe someday.  At least my grandkids won’t have to fight over photo rights, and they will know how to share them with one another.

I’ll end this with another staged studio image of myself for all of those readers out there:

I haven’t been doing the greatest job of posting baby pictures for everyone.  Thought I would do a quick post of the ones I took today.   Of course if you don’t care you can just ignore this post.   To the thumbnails -

Today is my sister’s 21st birthday.  She is a couple months shy of being twelve years younger then me I don’t think I’ll ever accept that she made it past around 6-8 years old.   Hopefully she enjoys her day today.

Here is what she looks like now:

But this is how she will always look like to me:

Been an extra day or so getting these pictures up, but here they are.   I still have to do a write up of the whole experience that I hope to get to in the next few days, but hopefully these pictures will keep you tided over until then.  If for some reason the pictures do not show up o this page for you, they are available here – http://www.flickr.com/photos/creeva/sets/72157614701117485/

When I say we are having a baby – I don’t mean in the abstract sense that it’s happening soon.  Literally we are having a baby right now.  This post like most of them I am writing ahead of time, so there will be some details missing.   The one most important is what day is this going to publish?   I’m not sure – the baby is due any day now, I have to be ready to rush out the door.  I am hoping to run by the blog for five seconds to get this alert published.  By the time you are reading this (depending on how quick you do) we should be either on the way to or at the hospital.  When we get home I’ll be putting up a new article with pictures and the whole nine yards.

The signs have started that we are going to be having our child in our arms very soon.  I don’t yet know the weight or length of him.  I don’t know what the time or day of his birth.   He is very close to appearing.  Some part of this since I’m writing this ahead of time reminds me of Linus telling Charlie Brown about the Great Pumpkin, in theory the Great Pumpkin is going to show up, but yet there is no proof.     We are hoping everything goes well, that there is no complications.   Wish us well.

I’ll be giving updates on my twitter feed, so watch that for the latest information.

Two nights ago one of my aunts added me as a friend on Facebook, I was actually the second family member on her list.   We were making some jokes back and forth about her not understanding the site completely, then she sent me a message that included this:

Hey, I just told a story about you today at work.  I told them I didn’t babysit when I was young because the first time I changed my nephews diaper it took me 30 minutes  because I was gagging soooooo much from the smell!  :)

So hopefully my child won’t inherit the same smell factor.   On the other side, imagine what my child gets to look forward to changing when I’m old, senile, and wearing Depends.

The picture is going with “love is with your family” motif.   That’s my father with my brother and myself (I don’t think he is really asleep).   Happy birthday dad.   Happy Valentine’s day to everyone else.

So out of all my writing that I know my family reads, they are reluctant to comment (granted my mother has good reason since I would turn it around).   they don’t want to go on record, they want to keep harmony better then I do, or they don’t really like me.   Whatever the reason I know I have a few siblings and a couple parents (since I assume my mother does check in occasionally and curses me under her breath) that read my site.   Yet the comments are few and far between if at all.   I do hear after something has been published for awhile, what facts or figures I managed to get wrong (mostly it’s details that don’t matter).  My father is good at this, and normally I don’t call him out (Hi Dad!).

I may have changed his mind a bit though, last time we talked I mentioned to in some ways this will be the only recorded history going forward.   That he needs to tell things in his point of view or they will be lost.   That if I’m wrong already one generation after him, what are his great-great grandkids going be?  They won’t have a magical insight that I was wrong, they will take it at face value.  So while my family are alive it is their responsibility to set things right, otherwise my word is truth.

I’m happy to be called out.  I’m happy to be told my facts are not quite right.   I would love to prove something isn’t my imagination (which sometimes I think they believe I make this stuff up).  I do hope that even though they don’t comment, they gain a memory back.   I amuse them.  I give them a smile for their day.  I’m also sure I give them a few curse words that cross their lips.

Yes writing about my family is cathartic to me, and I go to it when I crutch.   I don’t write exclusively about my family, since I write about whatever is happening in the moment in my head.   So I don’t expect them to comment everything I write – if my youngest sister started commenting on my article of things you should have ready before talking to a consultant I would wonder why?  I don’t need pity comments.

I’m also going to encourage them for keeping the family history going forward by emailing my upcoming child.   What do they want to tell him? What if they get hit by a bus tomorrow?   The best time to get this stuff down is today.   If my mother wants to email my son (which she’ll have to get the address from my sister), she is welcome to – I have no reason to censor it even if she would bad mouth me at all.   That’s for him, not for me.   When he is old enough and can read, he will have the keys to the email kingdom and can decide what he wants to do from there.   Will he cherish and protect the memories or will he delete them, putting all of our thoughts into digital oblivion?  I can only do the best to save his family’s history from my point of view, and I’m sure I still won’t be able to give him all the answers he or his descendants may have.

When he is born he will have 3 cousins, 5 uncles, 4 aunts, 6 grandparents, and 4 great grandparents still living.   To put that in perspective when I was born I had 0 cousins, 4 uncles, 4 grandparents, and 4 (maybe 3?) great grandparents living.  This gives him the benefit of more information input, plus with the advent of digital technology and archiving – in theory the e-mail archives should be more resilient then paper letters I would have lost over the years.

I started off this post one side and ended up another, but now I bring it all back.   It’s all about stories, history, and getting things right – even though view points will color the history.   I don’t want to be the only one with viewpoints on this blog, whether your friends, family, or a random stranger I’m happy to get and respond to comments.    I’ll leave you with that.

P.S. Yes that is me in the picture with the mullet – want to start something over it?

P.P.S. My family and friends also ask me when I’m going to write this story or that one.  It’s all in good time.  I’m hoping to collect as many moments as possible.

In anticipation of the birth that should be happening within the next week or so.  I’ve signed my child up with his first Gmail account and his first Twitter account.  Now I can harass him like I do his mother about all the interesting stories I find online, I wonder how much e-mail he’ll have to catch up with by the time he can read?  He already has his own domain name, which will launch a blog shortly after he is born.  We bought that domain shortly after we found out Xie was pregnant.

Before you think about asking though, no you can’t follow him one twitter.   Let me expound upon that, until it’s decided otherwise only people that Xie and I know in real life, close friends of the family, or family itself will be able to follow him.  His e-mail will be monitored until he proves himself trustworthy to self monitor.

I would have set him up with a Facebook account, but since their terms of use state you have to be thirteen, I don’t feel like already making him a rule breaker.   The birth will not be streamed live, but I will work to get video and pictures of him after he is born up as soon as possible.  Finally, No – I’m not setting him up with a Myspace account – and he has to prove he’ll use it before he get’s his own Flickr Pro account.

Watch my twitter feed for the latest breaking news when he is born – since it will be there first.

A long long time ago I ran a Yahoo Group entitled Marcon Drinkers it was started in 2001.   Before this group was started my circle of friends had another message board we were using.   One of the administrators went off the deep end started banning people and deleting posts.  He eventually found it funny just to delete the message board all together.  This is where I came into the picture.

Since I enjoyed the camaraderie of the group, and I had the technical know-how, I started a new Yahoo Group, the previously mentioned Marcon Drinkers.   The concept of the group and where the people came in, was that once a year our circle would descend upon a fantasy and science fiction convention in Columbus, OH called Marcon.  While we we there, there was mass amounts of alcohol consumed, except for just a small handful of occasions outside of there I don’t normally drink at all.  I’m not opposed to it, I just normally do not have a taste for it.    Moving on.

I managed to contact and grab people moving them to the message board.   For a time (2001-2004) it was quite active, I think I started dropping out more when I hung out on the SWG message boards most of the time.   I would say around (2006-2007) it really died, which is disheartening but people move on, friendships change, and people grow apart.   Our community wasn’t large enough to be self sustaining since there wasn’t any new blood.   People from the board attempted to start other groups, but none were as successful for the amount of time this one was.

Last year I was at a crossroads, I didn’t want to just delete the forum – since some people may actually still read it, so for them I continued and left it up.   Since nothing new was being posted I decided I was going to just crosspost my blog posts.  I originally hoped to stimulate conversation, but it seems the posts are standing alone in an echo chamber.  I did close membership to start spammers from popping up (since I always hated cleaning those out anyways).   So our peak was over 100 members, now it’s down to 46.   I slowly watch people drop off.   When I am the last one still standing I’ll take the group offline for good.

I do have backups of the groups since I don’t want the digital history to be gone, but it will last solely in my hands.  In a way it’s sad to watch a community die off.  First I did it with this group, then I relived it with Star Wars Galaxies.  Anytime a community is lost for any reasons there should be a sadness; a moment of reflection.   I think the main reason it is completely dead these days beyond dynamics changing is the advent of social networking.  I’m friends with many of these same people on different social networks like Myspace and Facebook.   This has given them more tools to empower themselves in the delivery of information to their friends.   A static mailing list scenario like Yahoo Groups  doesn’t fit into their world anymore.  Times, technology, and friendships change – but looking at the past will show us the journey on how we got to where we are today.