Old blog archive: 24 April 2004

I’m putting off studying for exams and googled “pirates of dark water fanfic” out of curiosity, and found this page

“…Let’s face it, the Strider series is not the most popular Capcom series, by any stretch of the imagination. Actual news to report on is rare. This causes many sites to stagnate, and they end up looking like a Pirates of Dark Water page. If you’ve seen one of those, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not pretty. Major updates consist of the webmaster notifying the community that merchandise is being sold on eBay, format changes, and the odd picture now and then. Sites like this play musical chairs and vanish.”

That’s a pretty unfair thing to say. I’ve never heard of Strider because I’m not a gamer, but this is a show that came out over 10 years ago, before animation as a serious medium really caught on, and it was canceled without any resolution, which turned a lot of people away, and it’s not something a lot of people think about or have access to. Yeah, I know we all wish that there’s more Dark Water content online, but what can we do? Not enough people remember the show well enough to be able to put a major amount of effort into creating online content, and those that do usually don’t have the time or ability to.

And if the “major updates” thing is a reference to my site–what else do you want me to do? I mean that, too–I want feedback for what I can do to make this site better for the people visiting it. I know I could be more diligent in getting episode summaries and such up, but just the fact that I already have this much content is a miracle (especially since the vast majority of it has gone up in the last 2-3 years, when this site’s been around since 1996), and it’s completely thanks to other people and their efforts that it’s come this far. This site is a culmination of not just my efforts at writing and compiling the content, but of pretty much all the major Dark Water fans online that have the ability to capture and compile content themselves. I’ve made this site as interactive as I know how to do, but it takes other people to drive the updates, too. Especially with this site.

I also try and do what I can to search for PoDW fanart and fanfiction that people have stored away in different art and writing communities, so that this really is your one-stop resource for pretty much everything online about the show. I’ve created a community at LiveJournal, and I think after exams, I’ll figure out how to start communities at DeviantArt and Orkut, too. Another problem is maintaining those, though, because I sort of feel obligated to keep on posting since I don’t know how to get people motivated enough to post on their own–I don’t think there’s really a way around that though, so…

(Well…that woke me up sufficiently. I’m off to the library–yes, at 10 PM on a Saturday, but that’s what happens when your work keeps you busy all through Dead Week so you have no choice but to start studying for exams the weekend before–to study like hell. These next 4 days are going to be awful…but I’ll have 1 1/2 weeks off after that to relax.)

Old blog archive: 09 April 2004

Watching “Betrayal” just to hear Bloth talk about the previous brigmaster’s “accident” (so freaking brilliant how cutthroat they made him, OMG ;o))–yeah, I’m a dork, anyway–in the Kramadorm, Ren sees Avagon (before he knows who she is) fighting with some humanoid. She throws him aside and he pulls out a sword and they wonder where he found it. It just hit me! He’s the one who told the brigmaster that Ren was down there–they must have given him the sword in compensation for him spying, and maybe even to kill off Avagon herself, but she was too good a fighter for him and he never was able to do it. Whee, revelations! 😀

Old blog archive: 08 April 2004

I think I need to work on my eBay strategies. That, and graduate and get a job and move away so I can manage my own expenses and not feel so guilty about buying this stuff and getting my parents pissed off at me for “wasting money on this crap.” But it’s hard to work on eBay strategies when the only reason I’m on eBay is to acquire rare PoDW merchandise. And it being rare, it doesn’t come up too often, and I’m almost always outbid because of reserves. (Stupid reserves.)

Last time this happened, though, the winner messaged me immediately after and he’s going to send me scans of his materials. This time, though…it’s a 200-page book (the PoDW style guide), so…I don’t know. Damn.