Busy Auron/Lulu Fandom Day

[auronlu]

Today I was going to hash out the Council of Elrond Lucil Yevon chapter of Love Her and Despair, with my usual starting point of spamming owlmoose, muggy_mountain or trekqueen with my inchoate ideas. In these incoherent letters, I babble at length and ask for advice, and have usually solved about 3/4ths of my questions by the time I hit Send.

But first, a glance at ff_press reminded me that GEOCITIES IS SHUTTING DOWN IN OCTOBER OHFUCK and I'd only archived one of my three Geocities websites (personal website). The AuronLu Shrine and an old MUSH website still need(ed) to be archived. The ff_press announcement led me to fanlore which I think I've heard of but forgotten, a Wiki which attempts to document all fandom.

So here is what I did today:

• Asked n00b questions of Fanlore's maintainers, including whether to avail myself of OTW's offer to host soon-to-expire Geocities fansites on their own service (but they're only going to archive fanfiction, not whole websites)
• Asked "what should I do?" questions of the aulu Community, which, much like my brainstorming questions to my friends, were largely solved in the course of my figuring out how to frame the questions and explain my thinking
• created a new subdomain on my labyrinthine website with a totally lame top level:  http://auronlu.istad.org
• Moved The Auron/Lulu Shrine from its home on Geocities to *drumroll*  http://auronlu.istad.org/aulu-shrine
• Downloaded the long-abandoned AuLu site on Geocities, which hosts a lot of funny, early fanart
• Learned how to make screencaps of entire browser windows
• Learned how to make Wiki entries
• Created half-assed Fanlore entries for:  Auron/Lulu as a pairing; The old AuLu site, The Auron/Lulu Shrine
  

Meanwhile, the Dodgers clinched a playoff berth by pounding the lowly Pirates in an incredibly half-assed manner.

In other words, it was a day to feel immensely accomplishful about things which actually are not all that important!

Comments

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

Very awesome that you put this stuff on Fanlore! renay and I have been creating a Final Fantasy section, verrrrrry slowly, ever since the wiki went into public beta, and this is excellent. If you feel your editing skills are up to it, could you add links to these articles from the FFX page? And how would you feel about making them subpages?

I really ought to do something similar for Paine/Nooj, and at least create stubs for the other FFX/X-2 major pairings, but the task seems so daunting that I haven't really been motivated...

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah -- it's so easy to do a TINY pairing... but a whole fandom is scary!

Um. Um. I will see about adding links...tomorrow? I only just learned how to create Wiki articles from scratch today (as opposed to going into a Wiki article and fixing someone's grammar). I don't entirely understand the organization scheme, nor do I know how to link articles as sub-pages, although I hazily think, "yeah, if I were organizing it, I'd have it as Final Fantasy X > Pairings > Auron/Lulu".

I saw those Final Fantasy stubs and thought about poking at them, but...gah...where to start? And I barely feel competent to be SpokesMouth for the history of Aulu fandom, let alone all of Final Fantasy fandom (since I didn't even parachute in until 2006).

On the one hand I'm tempted to suggest asking Renmiri, maintainer of ff_project, who migrated much of her stuff to The Final Fantasy Wiki (http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Wiki) after Wikipedia booted her for posting far too many in-depth and trivial articles on every wee character, location, etc of Final Fantasy games. On the other hand she goes hog-wild crazy, plus she's more into making a database of the game universes and characters than fandom or meta.

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

Hey, I've only been around since 2005. And I am so very aware that there is a ton of history I don't know, especially concerning the older games. But we have to start somewhere, and I feel competent to at least put together the skeleton, and then have other people fill in the gaps.

I think inviting Renmiri is a great idea, with the caveat that she understands that this isn't really for detailed information about the games. If nothing else, her projects should be documented -- seems like a pretty important part of the fandom's history to me!

I've created subpages for the main Final Fantasy page, so I can make the Auron/Lulu page a subpage if you want. Let me know.

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, do it! (I'd figure it out, but since you're already there!)


I will compose a coherent note to Renmiri tomorrow or in a few days -- I'm a sporadically active member of FF_Project's Forums (http://forums.ffproject.net/), a final fantasy messageboard she maintains, so I can grab her there.

However, I've nearly used up my allotted quota of Really Obsessive Fandom already this weekend, and I wanna get back to beating on Love Her and Despair. Geocities closure kicked me in the butt to work on fandom instead. And I still need to archive/re-host my ancient MUSH site, where I keep a lot of logs and resources for a 15-year-old-and-still-going MUSH.

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

actually it looks like you already created it as a subcategory. I did add a link from the main FFX page, though.

Thanks again for doing this -- it's a great start, and an even greater inspiration!

[trekqueen.livejournal.com]

oddly, I didn't get the spam for whatever reason in my email box of the discussions below my initial LJ comment at aulu. :D it is great you were able to find some of the folks who seemed to have disappeared!

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Now the question is whether they will REPLY. I've tried contacting some of them before. I've found active websites, blogs, and/or professional sites for all but one of those artists, but Kitt is the only one who ever seems to answer emails.

However, to my surprise, the fansite owner just wrote back! I'd emailed her before and not gotten an answer. She's happy someone likes her pages (maybe it's just me, hah!) and is willing to help with preserving 'em. At this point I've just asked if I may mirror them, or if she'd like to upload them somewhere else.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Email me if you would like to shift your sites over to my domain. I have a bunch of room and hardly use any of my bandwidth (Utena fanfiction is not in very high demand).

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much for the offer!

Now that I've got the stuff transferred to a new subdomain, I'm finding it very convenient, and the RL/fandom partition is maintained by having a different subdomain and no links between them.

I keep sending people to Archimage to read it. I can't remember how far I wrote comments to you for it... I just recently did a reread from start to finish, and it was even more incredible on the second read-through. I hope someday your muse lets you finish...it's scary cliffhanger time right now!