It's good to see people are still checking in on occasion. I'm sorry I didn't have the comments working initially: there was a StupidBug™ in the system which should be fixed now. (I'm going to add a comment form soon from which people can email me about bugs, or other issues in general.)

While the bigger article on roleplaying is coming, I want to talk a little bit about in character and out of character, or IC and OOC. These are terms that come from the MUCK world, distinguishing whether dialogue and action are coming from the character or the player. FurryMUCK has never had any rules about IC-ness, but it's clearly a role-playing environment. I don't mean this in the way "World of Warcraft" is, that is, with character attributes and experience levels and concrete goals and all that; I mean, simply, that you're playing a character in a virtual world, and even if you play that character as "a furry version of me," the character is not you, and the experience is not the same as IRC or IM. Character-to-character is not person-to-person.

Nonetheless, the IC:OOC ratio on FurryMUCK has progressively shifted more OOC over the years. In many parts of the MUCK the rooms really are essentially IRC channels, with little more than token nods to the setting and characters. I make no bones about preferring IC to OOC for MUCKs; some people seem to think it's odd to want to interact with characters rather than players, but that's setting up a false dichotomy. My player may still want to talk to your player, but role-playing is fun. It's a different context. And I think role-playing works best when those contexts are fairly clearly defined. This is why the Club rules start out as follows:

The Giants' Club is a roleplaying area. This means it's IC-only. We have an OOC command (look ooc for help) for the occasional comment, but abusing this is going to get you kicked, and the staff has final determination over what is and isn't IC. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "no-OOC" is one of the two Rules I Take Very Seriously, and staff will be bastards about the OOC rule. There are many, many places on FurryMUCK where OOC is just fine (or even expected); let us roleplayers have a few where it isn't.

"But why make a big deal about this?" you might ask. "You can roleplay when others are having an OOC conversation." In theory that's absolutely true; in practice, it rarely works. This is very much akin to a discussion board with a half-dozen people trying to have a serious conversation and two people making fart jokes. The people having the serious conversation can just ask the people making fart jokes to stop--they won't, and if they keep being challenged they'll insist on their God-given right to keep making fart jokes. They can try to ignore them, but the signal-to-noise ratio of the conversation is seriously degraded. Unless someone with the power to boot the guys making fart jokes off the board actually does boot them, the guys trying to have the real conversations eventually give up and go somewhere else, leaving the board to the guys making the fart jokes.

OOC conversation in an IC room isn't (usually) intended to disrupt, so you might think that's not a fair comparison. But in my experience the effect is exactly the same. When a little OOC chatter becames an actual OOC conversation, anyone trying to roleplay is faced with three choices: try to ignore it and face the signal-to-noise problem I mentioned above, give up trying to be IC and join in the OOC chatter, or leave. Or they can say something. I've had characters people don't know I play in the Giants' Club on occasion, watched OOC conversation take over the room, and seen people point out that what's going on violates the spirit of the area that theoretically everybody agreed to. And invariably, they catch shit for it.

Frankly, I don't like that. And I'm tired of the "how do you know I'm not really being IC? huh? huh?" response people sometimes try when they're called on it. Right, your spacefaring cybernetic vixen is entirely in character when she says, "Went over to SlobberFox's last night to watch an 'Iron Man' torrent and play 'Rock Band,' dude." How silly of me.

I'm not going to mince words here. If you are on FurryMUCK and go to the Giants' Club there, you agreed to the rules and as far as I'm concerned, you gave me your word you would try to follow them. If you think it's unreasonable and arrogant and just plain nasty of me to expect you to keep your word, I think I'm just going to live with it.

(I was going to write "unreasonable and cliquish" as an acerbic inside joke, but thoughts about "cliquishness" are for another blog post in the future.)

So, as threatened, it's a new site!

The observant will note that while the design's changed, the actual content hasn't, much. In no particular order:

• Yes, the look's a lot more spartan. I hope this won't annoy people too much, but I'm feeling more Zen these days.

• The ability to "navigate" by monthly archives is gone; it's kind of silly to have something like that for a site that gets updates a few times a year at best. I'm looking for another way to do an index by story title, too.

• Stories now have "tags" associated with them that will hopefully make it easier to find them.

• Tagged stories also have "related stories" blocks at their end based on associated tags, which will claim to take you to stories that might be similar but generally aren't. Yay tags.

• Images for stories are now in the stories they're for. Why didn't I do this before? I have no idea.

So to answer a few Anticipated Questions:

• Is anything new? Other than the mechanics, not yet.

• What about the macrophile roleplaying article you mentioned? It's coming along shortly. (Really. I promise.)

• Are you going to do the long-threatened blogging thing? Yes, although this time no promise about scheduling.

• Did you really delete stuff? I did, albeit minimally (two pieces). That doesn't mean those stories might not be back in rewrites. Why I did this is, well, a good topic for a future blog post. There's also a post or two about long-gone site maintenance removed.

• Crazy idea: are you ever gonna write a story again? Yes. No promise on schedule here, either, but I have ideas again.

(N.B.: I'm aware some of the styles look a little wonky in some browsers; I'll fix that shortly. Sorry!)

More »

If you came to the site in the last few days and got a huge list of errors, I apologize. The site's sysadmin is apparently doing a long-talked-about server move, and one of the WordPress plugins I use broke on the new setup. The new machine and old machine are both running currently, and while browsing to arilin.macrophile.com was last night directing to the new site, connecting to macrophile.com via SSH went to the old site. So I spent about an hour debugging files on the wrong machine. ("I can delete the broken plugin and it's still there! Aaaah!") A check just now as I wrote this showed the site now going to the old site, where the plugin is (probably unnecessarily) deactivated--so if you're seeing the text look a little strange, with underlines around words that should be italics and URLs in the "refurbished" message below instead looking like footnotes in [brackets], it's because the plugin that converts from my "Markdown" text formatting to HTML isn't working. On whatever machine you're currently seeing this on. Which if it's broken is the old one. Unless it's not. Unless I fixed it.

Some comments I approved on the old machine didn't show up on the new machine last night, either, because the new machine's database copy was apparently older than the old machine's. And I have no idea which database will be used when I post this. (I think I've approved those comments on both machines at this point, and I'm still not sure all of them are showing on... whichever machine I'm looking at now.)

Confused yet?

Anyway, while the comments below weren't entirely unanimous about the wisdom of wading into the dangerous waters of the "community site," nobody seemed to think it was a bad idea. Chaswari wrote, "The obvious thing to do would be to introduce memberships to this Giants' Club thing. That way you could have stuff like profile pages of members of a message board." He went on to opine that "would be rather pointless, since Giants' Club members can meet at the Giants' Club," but for people who aren't on FurryMUCK, the site is the Giants' Club. (Except of course that right now it's my blog, so it isn't.)

Mega suggested "a heavier emphasis on IC-ness (or at least 'worldbuilding')" to differentiate it, "so it's not just Yet Another Macro Message Board." This is certainly an interesting idea. And indeed, even though YAMMB is a great acronym, it's not what I want. The question, then, is "What do I want?"

I think a good way to answer that is to ask, "What do you, the prospective users, want?" I can't have the site be all things to all people, and I think there's often a temptation when one contemplates these community things to try and do exactly that. But a lot of existing sites are pretty good at what they do; throwing in an image gallery and a blogging module and what have you might not be the best use of resources.

So. What do you want?

(N.B.: this should not be construed as a promise of anything, nor a time schedule for any implementation. But I definitely want input!)

Okay, so I posted a "coming back soon" post eleven freaking months ago and nothing else. What the hell? Here's the situation.

As I wrote then (just scroll down!), most of my macrophile story output was for a limited-access publication called MegaMorphics. Stuff got written for MM, showed up there, then showed up here a couple months later. Then MM went on hiatus and so did my muse. I've pretty much given up on MM coming back at this point. And while I've been writing, my output hasn't been about macrophile subjects.

I'm not going to make any melodramatic comments about having nothing more to say with giants, that I've done all I can do with them--but you know what? I feel like I've done a lot with them. While I'm guilty of doing a few of the cliché "giant abuses littles for fun and profit" pieces, for the most part that was never really my thing. I think I've told some genuinely good stories, and managed to work in some elegance, some social and political commentary, some genuine horror and some comedy. I've even gotten to work in some magic realism – and in what I think of as my swan song, meta-commentary on macrophilia itself. (I'm still surprised I didn't get more flak for that!) All in all, I'm proud of most of my work here and only embarrassed by a little. All things considered, that's a pretty good track record.

This sounds like I'm leading up to saying that I'm officially closing up shop here, doesn't it? Well, not exactly. I'm intending to do something with the site; I'm just not sure what yet.

What I've been mulling over is this. While this page calls itself the home site for the Giants' Club, it really isn't, is it? Other than having the rules for the club on FurryMUCK there's not a lot of connection there. And I know a lot of those who've passed through here aren't on FurryMUCK anyway.

So maybe, maybe, this year I could put together a new site for the Giants' Club that really is for the Giants' Club. A community site, more about you than about me. After all, the Club on FurryMUCK really doesn't have "membership," it just has visitors. You should all be considered visitors – and if you choose, regulars – to the Club, too.

If you have any suggestions on what shape this idea might take, I'm all ears. And hopefully, I'll talk to you again in less than a year.

Well, maybe, at least. It's fair to ask, "Just what the hell happened? You've been AWOL for over a year, giant cat lady!" I don't have a particularly good excuse, but I'll give you the honest one.

The thing is, what basically kicked me in the ass to write macrophile-esque stories was an APA, or "amateur press association," called MegaMorphics. An APA is basically like a fanzine with a limited members-only production run: members run off copies themselves for other members and send them all to a "central mailer," who collates the copies together and mails them out. (It's this odd production method that makes it members-only, not a desire to be incredibly exclusive and cliquish.) Most of the stories that appeared on this web site appeared in MM a couple months first.

But, like many such things, MM didn't last forever; while it isn't officially dead, it's been on hiatus for over a year now. And, why yes, it's been a bit over a year since I've posted here. Coincidence? I think not. The last couple of stories I've posted here ("Higher Learning" and "Trompe L'oeil") appeared here before the APA, in part because I'd written a couple multipart stories for MegaMorphics that I didn't want to post here until they were finished---but of course that slowed down posting here and I didn't want to leave the place abandoned. Obviously, that didn't work out.

To add insult to injury, those unfinished stories are, well, still unfinished. (For the record, their working titles are "Bed & Breakfast" and "Gates.") I did actually write a couple things in 2006, but the major one wasn't macrophile at all (gasp) and a couple others are, at least at this point, private.

But, I don't want leave this place languishing another year. I'm going to do my best to get an unfinished story or two finished, maybe get a private story made public, maybe get some notes I've made over the past two years turned into actual stories. And, I think I'm going to do another redesign of the web site, bringing it up to a modern version of WordPress along the way (assuming the new version has the spiffy "white list" spam protection the old one does).

See you all here in... well, hopefully much sooner than last time.