contact_group

Where matters stand, today:

I am wondering why I bothered, but still, Livejournal is free, and the next person to be frustrated might be somebody who deserves better. For that reason, I've set up this community, to be used as a replacement for the old contact forms.

Feel free to apply to join, but understand that (at least for now), my logins are going to be extremely infrequent, happening maybe about once per year, when I get around to it. I will eventually see your message, at least as long as the spammers don't start hitting Livejournal. Just don't keep checking your inbox for something that might not be there until Winter, because that's a great way to drive yourself crazy.

If I admit you to one of my rings, I would ask that you please stay a member of this community. Those who belong to my rings are invited to comment on applications to the rings their sites are on, and yes, I do take their comments seriously. That doesn't mean that I put policy or decisions to a vote. It means that I listen to and think about your advice, doing so more seriously when your advice is backed up with a sound argument.

Assuming that there ever will be a "you" to listen to, on this group.

Some years ago, I created a site called the Almond Jar, and making use of a feature that came for free with my Bravenet membership, set up a few response forms which forward messages sent to community mailbox lists, allowing incoming messages to be seen, not just by me, but by at least a few of my associates at the then still existing Shrine of the Sleeping Gods. This was done to minimize response time, and seemed appropriate for a group that had no hierarchy.

The experience that followed over the next few years did not go well, as one might guess by reading the site. The original membership scattered, partially in response to the community induced drama mentioned in the Prima Nocturne Incident, and in part due to other joyous moments, some of which I've mentioned elsewhere. To sum up a lot of unpleasantness, we found ourselves in a community that had embraced the delusion that people could interact on a civilized level without the presence of established standards of reasonable behavior, that could not be ignored without social consequences following - "don't make waves, but aside from that, anything goes". Members of the BVS went on to solicit charitable contributions for "missionary work" in South Africa, raising substantial amounts of revenue, which they later couldn't account for - just as they suddenly started advertising vacation packages to a lodge they had purchased in (where else) South Africa. Rather remarkable given the fact that the leader of the group and his second in command had been saved from homelessness only by the fact that the high priestess was letting them both stay in a room, in her and her husband's modest walk-up. How had these financially unsuccessful people managed to raise the funds needed to invest in land on the other side of the world? They couldn't account for that, either, other than to say that Goddess provides, and that no, for the last time, the charitable contributions were gone.

Not much mystery, there, and a partial explanation of why the Prima Nocturne Incident had happened in the first place. If one wants to scam a community, dropping its average IQ is a good first step. Appeal to the venality and jealousy of those who were never the brightest students in their class, and enlist their support as one drives off those who might ask awkward questions of them at inconvenient moments. The BVS went on to start something we'll call "Hogwarts", a virtual academy for the teaching of "magick" and the version of Wicca practiced by their now centuries old famtrad, which nobody seems to have had heard of prior to the Clinton Administration, which supposedly was founded by the intermarriage of Scottish witches with the Cherokee. Why just try to coopt Native American or Celtic cultures, when one can try to coopt both, right? By their own account, they soon had hundreds of correspondence school students for every instructor (or was it thousands), making good money selling lessons that on content, even by fluff bunny standards, were noted to be extremely light on content. No mean feat, winning that competition.

Note the picture of Diogenes on my profile. I looked around in an on again, off again manner  for the next few years, looking for a Pagan group which had evolved in a positive direction, and with the possible exception of the Asatruar, found not a one. I came to see that my goal of establishing an ethical polytheism was a hopelessly unrealistic one, a conclusion that I only found supported when I returned recently, and found that a number of those from whom I had parted on supposedly friendly terms were now busy scoring political points for themselves at my expense, and at the expense of my one time associates. Leaving organized Paganism meant leaving people like that. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Aside from little touchups (like repairing broken image links), I never resumed work on the Almond Jar, moving on to other projects and interests, and abandoning the name "Antistoicus". The name, like that of the Shrine of the Sleeping Gods, had begun as a joke, anyway, and those who were in on it had long since scattered. While the site saw moderately heavy traffic (about a quarter of a million unique visitors per year, according to site stats), practically nobody was writing about it, and when they did write, as I've mentioned onsite, they seldom did so in a constructive way. There were a few who did, and yes, their support means something to me, a great deal in some cases. They're why the site still exists; but for them, I probably would have taken down the Almond Jar long ago. But when you get to the point at which you realise that you'd have a larger engaged audience reading at an open mike night, putting in the work to construct and maintain HTML just stops making sense.

End result: A list that was to be monitored by a few dozen people was not being monitored by just me, all other members remaining subscribed, but never logged in. There were no replacement monitors. Then, a few years ago, the spambots somehow found the list, with the result that messages sent using it ended up being buried in a mass of spam that turned message retrieval into an exercise in speed reading. Nobody seemed to be writing, anyway, there seemed to be almost no interest in what I was doing, so I shrugged, and gave up, completely, until recently, when I found a few references to pages on the Almond Jar on Google.

One of them came from somebody who expressed great frustration, because he had tried to get in touch with us (the Shrine) without success. The lack of success was no surprise, for there no longer was an "us" to contact, but I didn't like the thought of somebody trying to join one of my rings, as this gentleman said he was, and hitting a brick wall. I never wish to cause a well-intentioned individual frustration. I set up my livejournal membership the very day I became aware of that community and post, so I could join the community, explain the situation to the would-be applicant, expressing my regret over the inconvenience he had experienced, and create a way of getting into contact that would be a lot more reliable than using a Bravenet contact form and sifting through the spam.

Much to my amazement, I found my post to that community journal blocked by the owner, the very person who had posted about his frustration, who then never bothered to respond. Much the same thing happened when I contacted the other people who had posted in the time I was away, who seemed to see nothing strange in holding the writing in esteem while scorning the writer. In at least one case, I was in fact banned the moment I applied to join the community! Odd, indeed, but a confirmation of the wisdom of my earlier choices.