A fanworks catch-up will be coming soon, but until then, news of Dariasites:

• We’ve added a link to Eccles’s growing Lawndale Sun-Herald fansite to the sidebar. He’d still like fanworks material for it!

• Kemical Reaxion has told us that her colorful, but now dormant, Glitter Berries site will soon be moved to a free Web-host service, so that it’ll remain readily accessible. She’ll let us know when the new location goes live.

• In the past week, I’ve stored the state-of-the-moment for Daria fansites, including the DFB and its HaloScan comments. Ten sites thus far, with a sub-site still to come. I’ll be glad to copy these, with their custom access menu, to your blank CD-R. If interested, e-mail me at the address in my profile.

• Scissors is also creating full Website archives (as are others). He’s making these compressed ZIP files, along with some of mine, available for download. (He’s getting clearances from Webmasters, when possible, and will soon be updating that page.)

• HSX, Scissors, and several others are collaborating on a new fansite, to be called Lawndale Online, and tentatively scheduled to debut on 9 July. It will use many of the Outpost Daria archives. They intend to provide abilities to self-upload, comment about, and rate fanworks. For details, see this PPMB thread or bookmark this Fandom Wiki entry.

• The Angst Guy plans more updates and tweaking for works stored on his site, which may soon have a contents page as well. I’ll bet this go-round will include the long-awaited, just-posted tenth installment of his “Pause in the Air” stories.

Oh, and our own site has a tweak at the top of the page, as well ...

Labels: Sites

On one of the message boards, one of the posters wrote:

Hell, bring it up. Just another long-standing example of how it’s becoming less and less fun being in Daria fandom. There’s the occasional fanfic, but aside from a burst of posts over the past couple of weeks. ... This was supposed to be about having fun.

Combine that with Martin Pollard’s decision to no longer update Outpost Daria, and the question in the header comes to mind: Is Daria fandom less “fun” than it used to be?

The approach of a sophist might be: Define fun. Such an approach doesn’t go anywhere, as “fun” is an essential idea, one that can only be defined by words that already mean close to the same thing as “fun”: “enjoyable,” “pleasurable,” “amusing.” I suppose the question we’re asking is really a question made up of other questions:

1: Are the people as nice as they used to be?
2: Are the stories better?
3: Is the discussion more interesting?
4: Does the general atmosphere promote pleasantness?
(And is “pleasantness” a real word?)

So let’s take these one at a time:

1: Are the people as nice as they used to be? I chuckle at that one. Frankly, I’ve never known the people in Daria fandom to be particularly nice at all. That’s not particularly a problem. Some people just like to argue, and some people take great pleasure in being assholes.

I mean, face it. Our object of worship is a cynical, sarcastic teenage girl who pretty much rejects any concept of “niceness.” You might get a “Hi” out of Daria if you seem particularly smart, and don’t say anything that could be construed as stupid.

That might be a big problem in Daria fandom — it attracts people who are drawn to its anti-social character, people who are themselves anti-social, or people who see themselves in real life as being opposed to some outer authority.

I remember when Daria fandom used to be much nastier than it is today. There was a lot of “clueless newbie” abuse and the Masters of Fandom had formed very tight cliques — and they weren’t averse to making the “argument from authority,” either. What was the worst part of it all is that most of those same people patted themselves on their back about how much nicer and kinder they were than other real-life people! (Despite, of course, bragging about how sarcastic they were during some real-life situation or another.)

Face it — today, Daria fandom is a quantum leap nicer. The administrators at PPMB generally make an effort to be nice to people — no matter how new, how clueless, or how obnoxious those people might be. The more egregious offenders have left of their own accord (and in some rare cases, been driven out). People who wouldn’t have been tolerated for three message-board posts in the old fandom are encouraged in the new one. (Sometimes, sadly encouraged.)

If you have a beef with one particular überfan, well, that might not make your experience pleasant. Generally, however, I claim that Daria fandom is a nicer place than it used to be.

2: Are the stories better? The stories are better, definitely. I think, however, that we’re seeing a general movement away from fan-fiction writing, and that is not better.

I’m to blame for part of this. In the old days, people would just submit any old turd to fanfiction.net, stuff that was barely spell-checked, much less beta-read. There was a whole lot of fanfic out there. A whole lot of it wasn’t good, but there was a freedom of expression not seen in today’s fandom, a willingness to throw any old crap out there and see if it sticks.

After a while, however, I’ve noticed (and contributed to) a decreased tolerance for bad fan fiction. It’s not as if there’s an army of CINCGREENs out there saying, “Boy, that story you just wrote was a frozen shitsicle.” Rather, the old fandom was more of a Special Olympics — “Everyone gets a prize for bad fanfic!” You could write anything and get ten people praising you for how great it was. (Then again, I’m sure people were just glad to see fanfic of any kind.)

Today, I’ve seen some fanfic not get any comments at all, either at PPMB or at fanfiction.net. Were those stories bad? I don’t know, but there’s no ego-boosting going on. This has good consequences, but it also has bad consequences.

Frankly, people want to be recognized for their work, else they wouldn’t write fan fiction at all. There has to be some way to say, “I acknowledge your work, and I’m glad you wrote it — I just don’t think it’s as good as it could be.” (But try posting that, and see what reception you get.)

Furthermore, people like E.A. Smith and The Bug Guy and The Angst Guy might have also had an inadvertently detrimental effect on fan fiction. The Angst Guy, for example, ruthlessly edits his work and always has it beta-read. He brings his skills as a professional writer to the task, and the quality of his work clearly shows.

The results are works that are so polished that they might intimidate a beginning writer. “I’m not going to be able to write something as good as ‘Darkness’ or the ‘Love’s Labours Trilogy,’ so why should I try?”

I don’t know how to solve this problem. I don’t know if there’s any solution. Maybe I simply ought to do as Kara Wild once suggested, and start reviewing fan fiction again, so at least the fandom will be talking about fan fiction as opposed to talking about other scattered interests. (Of the six forums on PPMB, only two are devoted to fanac.)

3: Is the discussion more interesting? I think the discussion is more or less the same. It’s worse in some ways, better in others.

I’ll explain. If you’ve been kicking around fandom as long as I have, it seems that everything has been “talked out.” Everything has been debated to death. “Where is Lawndale?” “Are Daria and Jane gay?” “Why did Daria kiss Tom?”

All of this stuff has been asked and answered and asked and answered, to the point where some of the more obsessive fans (i.e., most of us) feel that the “text” of Daria has been examined to the nth degree. Most fans have already formed strong opinions on certain canon matters, and it would take a very persuasive argument to budge us from those positions.

On the other hand, side discussion is more interesting because I think the people are, well, smarter now than they were in the past. The people who were in fandom in 1999 are eight years wiser and just a little bit smarter.

Furthermore, the fans that moved in afterwards were real intellectuals, and not just poseurs — the newcomers were people well-versed in medicine, or politics, or philosophy, or the arts. You couldn’t just get away with flimsy arguments on certain topics, because there was someone who could quote chapter and verse at you. When reading these arguments, one did not get the sense one was being lectured to. Rather, one could “learn something new every day.”

So is the discussion more interesting now than it was in 1998? That depends. What do you want to talk about?

4: Does the general atmosphere promote pleasantness? Note that this is a different question than “Are the people nice?” You can have nice people in a bad atmosphere. People make up part of the atmosphere, but not all of it.

For some reason, I want to say, “No, it really doesn’t.” It’s simply an initial impression. There’s nothing truly vibrant out there in Dariadom.

I believe one of the reasons is that we have downgraded Daria fan art to a subgenre. Fan art is tucked away more than it is out in the open. There’s an absence of an aesthetic. The format of the PPMB is dull gray. The format of the SFMB is blue-on-black eye-strain-o-vision.

I don’t have a really good answer to question 4. Maybe you do.

Labels: Essays, Fandom

Sometime at around 11 pm Eastern Standard Time, Martin Pollard, webmaster of Outpost Daria, told the assembled fandom (or at least, that part of it that assembled at the PPMB) that he would no longer be updating Outpost Daria. It was not so much of a “Boy, I don’t really want to do Outpost Daria anymore” post but a sort of a “So long, Mac — I’m getting away from it all” message.

Chat rooms immediately erupted in wild accusations, with friendships broken as fast as someone could type a frowny-face emoticon. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth on the message boards.

Long-time fans like E.A. Smith suddenly began randomly picking fights with passersby on the street like a crazed jackal, the skin of his victims neatly wedged underneath his sharpened fingernails, as he roamed the streets in a caffeine-fueled frenzy. They had to call the tranquilizer gun in for Richard Lobinske, who at the last report was holding off police with a flit gun filled with DDT, his clothes in tatters, cackling like a madman on acid ...

Okay. That’s a bit of hyperbole. Nothing like that happened, although it would have been much more interesting if it did. The mood seems to be like that of a man who has been told he has terminal cancer — everyone thinking, “What other bad news am I going to get? Wife leaving me? Dog humping my daughter? Bush doesn’t leave in 2009?”

Before I wax about the greatness of Outpost Daria, let’s get the hedgehog out from under the bush. Martin Pollard and I have not ... uh ... gotten along, to put it mildly. For the longest time, I didn’t like Martin, and I’m sure Martin didn’t like me.

I also don’t know exactly how we stand now. I think we have a better appreciation for each other’s accomplishments — this comes with age, when you realize that you treated the most trivial of stuff like it was the most important thing in the world, which, of course, it was at the time.

So I’ll get my parting shots out of the way before I talk about the good stuff and this new crisis in fandom. I thought Martin frankly could be a real dick towards new fans (he has mellowed out a bit over the years, though). I still don’t like “Sins of the Past,” but I suspect that Martin probably didn’t mean for anyone to interpret it the way I noticeably did, so, no, Martin is not a secret rapist.

I thought his picking and choosing of “Featured Authors” was the most pretentious thing on Earth, but he changed even that, putting Thomas Mikkelsen in the Martin Hall of Fame and opening the whole process up to fan input. And since he pulled back from his involvement in day-to-day PPMB chat, I can’t even nag him for throwing his weight around (figuratively) in chatroom arguments. (My wife, however, still has not forgiven Mr. Pollard. C’est la vie.)

My damnation of Martin was that he was a BNF — a Big Name Fan, with all the good and the bad that entails. My focus was on the bad, but now, let’s focus on the good.

I’ve said for the longest time that you can never be a self-proclaimed BNF, as BNF-hood is thrust upon you, and Martin was definitely big name as a fan. Hell, it’s hard to even imagine a Daria fandom without Martin taking an active role in it, and my mind boggles at the prospect.

Outpost Daria was the ultimate fan shop. Always had been, even when I started lurking about the fandom in 1999/2000. Part of this is because Martin is one of the few fans who have been involved since the very beginning, the veteran of a thousand fannish wars.

When other fans’ sites went down, such as alt.lawndale, who was there to pick up the slack? Martin was.

When the Lawndale Commons message board went down, who was there to provide an alternative message board, which was the Outpost Daria message board? Martin was.

When Outpost Daria was “Foxed,” a lesser man might have just said, “Fuck it, I’m getting out of here.” Martin didn’t. He hung in there and saw it out till the end.

When fans needed to know something important or juicy, who got the word out on the message boards? At alt.tv.daria (when it was still one of the first fan stops)? Who got the word out in the #daria+ chat room? Martin did.

In short, if service to the fandom over the years could be measured in Girl Scout badges, Martin would probably have to wear a badge-covered suit instead of a sash. And the odd part is that these aren’t just mindless superlatives. The record speaks for itself.

This is why Martin is a BNF in the good sense of the term. The fandom, frankly, would not be the way the way it is today, might not have even survived, without the tireless work of Martin and others like him. And to hear that Martin is abandoning the post is sad — but face it. Martin has reached the stature where he doesn’t owe anyone any explanation. He can just say, “I’m leaving, you’re going to have to work out these issues on your own. I’ve done enough for fandom, thank you.”

And what issues? Think about this. The scripts. The fan art. The fan fiction, most of which is probably the only record of any fannish activity before 2000. Some of that stuff is irreplaceable. Granted that a lot of it is probably not worth reading, but how’re we gonna know if it isn’t there to look at? Hell, in five years, people might be saying, “Michelle who?” “Invisigoth who?” “Thomas who?”

I’m chuckling, thinking about the massive pain in the ass it’s going to be to copy and store the contents of the site. Right now, fans are praying that Martin will turn over the contents and the domain name to someone else, ’cause if he don’t, then someone is going to have to bite the bullet and, you know ... actually ... do something, instead of just talking about doing something. (I hear Eccles has volunteered his site. “Poor blighter,” as WWII pilots might have said.)

Well, they call it “crunch time” in football. Let’s see if anyone actually steps up and takes on the mantle of being the Number One Daria website, or if people just sit about and watch Outpost Daria blow away like dust in the wind.

Because without a channel actively showing Daria, and without a premier fan site, all we’re left with is the PPMB. Either this generation of fans is going to step up to the mike and throw down, or the fandom is going to go under, collapsing under the weight of its own apathy.

(“But, CINCGREEN,” you say, “how come you don’t step up, huh?” You’ve gotta be kidding. I’m hitting middle age, and running an Outpost-Daria-like site is a full-time job, with no pay, and fans biting your ankles because you posted their fic in Times New Roman instead of Arial. I want my ankles kept clean. Let some young stud or studette step up and do the job.)

So what brought this ugly mess on? Of course, I gotta speak out, because the words are already being said in other places. Might as well get the shameful mess out in the open.

Apparently, at some point, Martin decided to host the Kara Wild/Glenn Eichler interviews on his website. Kara wanted those interviews removed from Martin’s website. Kara stated that those interviews belonged to her, and they would pretty much be the exclusive property of DVDaria. She told him that he was being a very bad person for not removing those interviews post-haste.

From what I can tell, several things happened after that:

a) Martin packed it in,
b) Martin has not removed the interviews (this might not be true, as I can’t find them on the site), but
c) Martin removed all of Kara’s fics.

Martin ain’t saying nothing. But you can draw your own conclusions.

Now, I’ll be up front with you. If I had been in Kara’s shoes ... I would have just friggin’ let it go. I mean, really ... how many fans do you think were going to find those interviews on DVDaria? Maybe three, tops. Hell, I don’t even visit DVDaria but once in a blue moon. MTV ain’t putting out those DVDs soon, and MTV has frankly turned its back on us. You might as well replace the site with a four-word blurb, “DVDs ain’t out yet.”

If the interviews had stayed on Outpost Daria, at least people would have seen them. Dunno. Tough call if I’m in Kara’s shoes, but I’d probably just overlook it, unless Martin had somehow claimed that he was the one doing the interviewing.

Was Kara in the right to ask Martin to do that? From what I understand, yes. (And please, let’s not chat about copyrights and fanworks and trademarks and Acuff vs. Rose because it makes my ass hurt. As far as I’m concerned, we’re all thieves. The minute I wrote down the name “Daria Morgendorffer,” I committed a crime, possibly in Albania.)

Was Martin in the right to do what he did? Yeah, ’cause it was his site, dumbass. He pays the electric bills, so let’s not get pissed when he flips the switch. Hey, he’s even agreed to keep the lights on till December. Then, he releases the hounds. He could have just left without a “by your leave” and everyone would be sitting with their thumbs up their asses, wondering what to do next.

However, I don’t think it was a dignified way to go out. Not at all. Kara was a jerk taking a private manner public. If she was going to go after Martin’s jibblies, she should have just said, on the PPMB, “Look, please take all of my stuff off your site, and now. Gracias.” If people wanted to know why, it should have been a matter for private messaging. Not “I’ve asked you three times, and if you don’t do it ... well, I’ll ask you again, and really loudly!”

Martin was a jerk by, in effect, taking his ball and going home. Maybe ... oh hell, I don’t know, maybe both sides could get together, and ... oh ... I don’t know ... apologize! (“But I’m in the right! But I’m in the right and GOD AND MAN MUST KNOW THAT I’M IN THE RIGHT!” — the motto of every fandom, everywhere.)

All right. I, CINCGREEN, have officially become the voice of reason of Daria fandom. You’ve finally broken me. God, I hate you all. “When the gates of Hell are full, the dead will walk the earth, and CINCGREEN will be the voice of reason, and Lynn Cullen will walk the land, without let or hindrance.” *

Anyway, as Cypress Hill wisely said, “I ain’t going out like that, I ain’t going out like that.” And Martin ... well, he shouldn’a gone out like that. It besmirches his legend. But, as I said before, Martin has reached the stature where he doesn’t owe anyone an explanation.

So shine on, you crazy diamond. I’ve battled you many a day, and like Patton saluted Rommel, I salute you and thank you for at least nine or ten years of service to this fandom. I hope your health improves, and ... well, Martin, you know what they say ... “You don’t leave fandom, fandom leaves you.”

So ... if fandom hasn’t quite left you yet, don’t give up the keys to Outpost Daria so soon. I think even I would be glad to see you back.

But if Outpost Daria in 2008 becomes the home of “the cutest baby pictures you ever saw,” well, don’t say you weren’t warned.

___
* Canadibrit has released a new ep of “The Look-Alike Series.” Man. Outpost Daria going under. New “TLAS” fic. “Set the wayback machine, Mr. Peabody, we’re going back to 1999 ...!”

Labels: Essays, Fandom, Sites

Martin Pollard has announced that his 20 May update of the Outpost Daria site will be his last, due primarily to personal matters. You can read his notes about the decision here. He expects to maintain the site’s presence on line until at least the end of this year.

Martin deserves a rousing cheer for keeping a site going for nearly nine years that has been a backbone of continuity, a richly detailed resource, and a storehouse of creativity — in, around, and (with fanworks) built upon the original series.

His clean and functional Web design, and comprehensive fanworks coverage, have both been huge assets to this fandom. As well as to me, and to many others, whose first sense of the richness and variety of the response to Daria came from his site.

I sincerely hope that Martin could ultimately transfer the Outpost’s contents and domain name to some other fan, or group of fans, who would continue it. Either later this year, resuming updates, or whenever he no longer chooses to bear the Web hosting costs.

In any event, he deserves our thanks, and his efforts will be sorely missed.

James will have his own perspective, I’m sure, from a much longer interaction with both Martin and his site. We want to hear yours, as well, so click on that link below and tell us about it.

Labels: Fandom, Sites

PPMB is indeed working, though erratically and slowly, 24 hours after the server outage affecting both Dariaboards. If a page doesn’t load at all, reloading will usually work. Many of the page graphics, though, including avatars, may not load.

Once again, all PPMB posts from late evening Saturday to late evening Tuesday (U.S. time) have been lost. New users’ account signups, and revisions to existing users’ accounts, from that period will have to be redone.

SFMB is still not working because, as Gamer reports this evening, “Some accounts did not correctly get restored and are still in the process of being restored, including my primary account [the domain gamerspage.com], which includes the SFMB. This is causing extreme disk I/O on the server, slowing almost all services to a crawl.”

Gamer also says that he’ll be moving both boards “to a faster and less utilized server within the next couple weeks.” It will have smaller loads and daily instead of weekly backups, so the loss of content from any future failure will be smaller.

Thursday, 1:00 pm (PT):

SFMB is back on line, with the same loss of three days of postings. Response and loading times for both boards are back to normal.

Labels: Sites

The board of last resort appears to be the old Scorched Remnants Message Board at http://members.boardhost.com/SUSUexp.

If you just can’t wait for one of the two main boards to restart, jump in the pool — just be aware that the water was drained out in about 2005 and what water is there has now turned green.

Wednesday, 11:30 am (PT) from Greybird:

PPMB has returned, though erratically, after being down for 12 hours. Use of the backup apparently was necessary, and all messages and account changes from late Saturday to late Tuesday (U.S. time), about three days, have been lost. SFMB has not yet returned at all.

Labels: Sites

The PPMB and SFMB are down, so you folks might as well post here.

Update from Gamer via Greybird, Tuesday, 11:45 pm (Pacific time):

The engineers at the PPMB/SFMB Web host are doing what’s apparently an emergency motherboard swap. Not minor surgery, in other words. It’s expected to be done in 1 to 3 hours, thus by early Wednesday (U.S. time). Hardware engineers aren’t readily available during the night hours, thus the delay.

The Websites’ accounts are capable of being “restored from the weekly backups on our spare server, just in case the data is not retrievable even after the motherboard is replaced.” In the worst-case scenario, a backup restore, it’s another 12 to 24 hours of downtime, that is, until mid-day to late-night Wednesday (U.S. time). Some recent postings may be lost if a backup is used.

Labels: Sites