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Topics of concern - Naming

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ONLY NICE THINGS

13:00 / 29.01.07

It's not so much that non-magicinvisibles people are being driven off that I'm worried about so much as the magicinvisibles people are the only people who are keen enough to join to go through the applications process. I'm just guessing, mind.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

19:45 / 29.01.07

In all seriousness, or at least semi-seriousness, should we have a concerted senior-members-invite-a-pal membership drive to try to solicit members from various communities to rebalance the influx of magickal Grog Munchkinfan seekers every once in a while?

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:43 / 29.01.07

That's assuming that the senior members know people who aren't.

21:48 / 29.01.07

i don't know about you, but none of my friends like comics until i tell them to.
i know some magickos, but i don't know that they'd call their shit occult. none too self-critical neither. they'd last minutes in the temple, i'd wager.

could be fun, though...

06:33 / 30.01.07

In my limited experience (two friends tried to join, neither into chaos magic or the Invisibles) it still takes a long time to join. Both were pretty eager to join, but only one stuck it out long enough to actually get in (although Rayvern normally lurks in Book due to time constraints and other such nonsense).

Obviously this links more into the Admissions thread than the naming thing. But I do tend to link friends to threads on Barbelith I think they might enjoy. I don't know how many people do that.

(Admittedly a lot of my friends read graphic novels but most aren't massive Musclesom fans).

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

09:23 / 30.01.07

I think the majority of people I've introduced to the place haven't been majykque (or however one spells Jade's mum's name) or comics people, particularly.

12:31 / 30.01.07

runny bum gunge

There you go. Naming debate equals over.

16:26 / 30.01.07

I think, somehow, that Barbelith now stands for something over, beside, or above the meaning conferred by association to the Genetically Modified writer. It will always track back to the Big Red Sunlike Thing, but having evolved over time it's filed in my personal headspace as something different and separate. But that's just me.

I came here by a disjointed route; I used to read the Invisibles annotations on the Bomb, and then didn't go there for a fair amount of time, then when I went back, I found Barbelith in it's current state. After about a year of reading from the outside I decided to apply to join. I thought nothing of it from thereon in until I received the invitation, and then I was, well, a very happy bunny.

I think a name change might be an interesting prospect, as it would, most likely, totally divorce the board from the Great Bald One's writing and Majycke - but I don't have any further thoughts on that at the moment. Would Barbelith the Site be Barbelith the Board without Barbelith the Name?

17:13 / 30.01.07

i think there would be endless wisecracks about and references to the new barbelith being the new barbelith, and the new name would take a power of persuading to stick.
anything that has ever been renamed has been called the same name for a good while after.

i think the exceptions to that rule are usually products with an ad campaign behind them, like marathon bars and opal fruits, or stuff that really needs to change, like rhodesia or stalingrad. some folks i know still call them opal fruits, though. perhaps that is because stuff with an emotional attachment is harder to rename. see all the rhodey's who still call zimbabwe rhodesia for reference, or the citizens of volgograd who argue about recapturing the fame of the name they lost to de-stalinisation.

09:06 / 05.02.07

I think a name change might be helpful if it were changed to something that attracts people who are interesting, articulate, and knowledgeable about things like music, art, queer/gender/whatever theory, and other things that my favorite posters tend to be knowledgeable about. In other words, if the new name were to attract more people like the people who I would not have met if it were not for Barbelith but whose acquaintance I currently value quite highly, that would be super.

My current problem with Barbelith is that the people who are active in discussions are often not very interesting to me, whereas the people who are interesting to me are not very active in discussions. This is probably because it's the same old crowd of regulars, some of whom know each other in real life, and many of whom keep in touch via Livejournal posts or what-have-you, so there's very little point starting new threads on Barbelith about something because the people you'd actually want to discuss it with will be seeing you down at the pub shortly or will respond if you post about it on your LJ instead.

However, it would be nice to meet some new faces who would provide fresh voices in the crowd. To be totally elitist, it just doesn't seem like Barbelith is attracting new people very often who are of the same caliber as the people I'm talking about. Perhaps a change of name and a new look would help that.

I don't know if that matches up with anyone else's experience. I often feel very much like I'm on the periphery of this community, so I don't know how representative my feelings are of the more general sentiment.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:28 / 05.02.07

Perhaps we could come to some temporary compromise, such as adding a new subheading to the front page? Like we've got the seperate forum headings, but more like a mission-statementy thing.

BARBELITH underground. For: music, art, queer/gender/whatever theory, cool things and stuffs.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:38 / 05.02.07

I'm amused by the fact that, less than a week after I asked the question 'is Barbelith seen from the outside as being an Invisibles/Grant Morrison related place?' it's answered by people wanting to do a reread and discussion of The Invisibles.

Just sayin'.

18:16 / 05.02.07

It does make the basic premise of this thread something of a nonsense, doesn't it?

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:31 / 05.02.07

Actually, I think it largely proves the point.

12:35 / 06.02.07

Ditto.

12:47 / 06.02.07

Why? The apparent need for the Comics forum to annotate the Invisibles yet a-fucking-gain would seem, to me, to suggest that Barbelith *is* primarily a board for talking about Grant Morrison and Magic, and that it's actually the rest of us who've got it wrong somewhere along the line.

12:54 / 06.02.07

No, you get it wrong, the rest of the board is for what we do between Morrison's releases. Sometimes its whole weeks y'know!

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

14:18 / 06.02.07

I'd venture that there are several thousand users that weren't around when the Invisibles was annotated the a-fucking-first-time, Randy.

What exactly is the problem here? There's a sneering tone in these recent posts that I'm not very comfortable with, like y'all have "outgrown" this silly comic-book twaddle that some of the kids are persisting in droning on about.

You'd have to drill reasonably deep (ninth sub-forum down, no?) to get to any discussion of Morrison on Barbelith at present. I think fretting over questions like is Barbelith seen from the outside as being an Invisibles/Grant Morrison related place? and being snidely "amused" by one discussion thread among literally hundreds of others discussing everything from polytheism, Wyndham, U.S. foreign policy to cookie recipes and Tyra Banks' talk show smacks of navel-gazing hysteria.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

14:27 / 06.02.07

Thing is, Matt, that there are people who do come here expecting this to be an attempt at some kind of GM-inspired utopia, and get frustrated and hostile when they don't find it. Over in the "moderating the Temple" thread, we had one poster complaining that the Temple regulars who don't adhere to Grant Morrison's model of magic (as expressed in Digital Ink and on his website) were spreading "disinformation." Appeals to GM as a kind of absent authority do happen.

By-the-by, the issue in the Comics forum is not confined to a single thread. The proposal is for a thread on every single story arc, the first of which has already been created. If carried out as planned, this is likely to be quite a high-impact project.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

14:51 / 06.02.07

I can certainly see it taking over the whole front page of the forum if they run concurrently, and there's DEFINITELY going to be a lot of overlap in active times.

As Mordant says in the thread, though, if that's what people want, then... and as Randy says, rather depressingly though plausibly in this very thread, maybe it IS the rest of us who've got it wrong. I'd kind of like that not to be the case, but...

(I AM MADE OF ELLIPSES...)

14:55 / 06.02.07

I'd venture that there are several thousand users that weren't around when the Invisibles was annotated the a-fucking-first-time, Randy.

And what? Does the Bomb no longer exist? Have all the threads that were created to talk about it been deleted from Comics? This is just covering over old ground for the hundredth time. I'd be amazed if anybody manages to say anything new about it that isn't already present in one of those older threads or on the Bomb subsite.

Opening up Comics and discovering at least eight threads dedicated to Morrison on the first index page isn't exactly having to drill deep. I'm just glad that the frankly insane notion of having a thread for every single issue of the damn thing has been nixed.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

15:36 / 06.02.07

I hear what you're saying, Mordant. But I think a newcomer/visitor would have to be remarkably obtuse to come to Barbelith and think that it's even vaguely Morrison-centric after two minutes of browsing. Comics hardly enjoys pole position in the forum list (as stated, ninth). Any new Invisibles storyline thread will inevitably sink the others off the Comics front page (like the Big Brother threads in TV, etc.). And this current project will last weeks, probably, and then it'll be back to situation normal.

Granted, there will be a number of people who are bloody-minded Grant Morrison adherents that join Barbelith, read only a few select forum threads, and still persist in bullheadedly trying to "Morrisonize" the Temple or whatnot.

But I find it hard to believe that the proportion of Morrison acolytes drawn to Barbelith like moths to flame is much greater than the percentage of general obsessives drawn to any given Internet-based community. Our random allotment of obsessives just happen to be more probably obsessive about Morrison than anything else.

All that to say that "Barbelith" is (a) a nonsense word, or (b) a reference to an obscure satellite in a (by general standards) rather obscure and quite good comic book.

The reference to a rather obscure comic book may draw the occasional wanker, but at least we know it's a wanker with passingly decent taste in comics. I kind of like that.

17:53 / 06.02.07

And what? Does the Bomb no longer exist? Have all the threads that were created to talk about it been deleted from Comics? This is just covering over old ground for the hundredth time. I'd be amazed if anybody manages to say anything new about it that isn't already present in one of those older threads or on the Bomb subsite.

Dude, the point of the old threads being old threads, and the new threads being new threads is that we want to look at the Invisibles through up to date eyes. The old threads are meaningless to the newcomers who weren't around at the time of the original annotations, because those conversations in those threads have long since been DEAD. It's hard for a newbie to jump into a 5 year old conversation, with some of the people who were originally there, not even posting on this board anymore.

And frankly, Randy, I think you're being far too negative about the entire thing. If you don't want to participate, then that's fine. I think we can do without your snark and bitter posts and still move along quite happily through our re-reading of The Invisibles.

18:48 / 06.02.07

How does the age of the annotation make it meaningless? That's a ridiculous thing to say.

19:03 / 06.02.07

Ach, if the kids want to reannotate, let 'em. Don't think I can be bothered this time around but I daresay I'll quite enjoy reading their version.

As far as the name's concerned, I'm happy enough with 'Barbelith'.

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:09 / 06.02.07

Well, what's interesting about the new Invisibles thread is how clearly it is not actually purposed as an annotation thread, despite the claims. As Oddman says above, it is an opportunity for people to reread the Invisibles - in effect, it's a book club, but a book club that, rather than getting one thread like the Iliad or Don Quixote, is bargained down to getting about a dozen from a bid of sixty or so, because the Invisibles is a more important work than the Iliad or Don Quixote, obvs.

So, there's a combination of textual analysis, portentous one-liners, tenuous associations, wikipedia links, tales of how the Invisibules changed my life (man), speculation about what might have been going on in the mind of the Great Man, statements of the blindingly obvious, leapings-ahead to favourite bits... if there was a serious intent to annotate or reannotate the Invisibles, then a wiki could have been set up, or even a move could have been made to reopen the Bomb. This is more like a group of people reading a lot of comics in the pub. V-Forum meet, really.

Which is _fine_, but probably doesn't need to fill the first screen of comics. Perhaps a compromise could be reached if it doesn't settle down in to a scholarly page-turner by the end of the.. how long is it between arcs? A week? I'd suggest ghosting the arc one thread and putting a link to it in the first post of the arc two thread. Then, ghost the arc two thread, put a link to it and the arc one thread in the first post of the arc three thread, and so on. At the end, post a thread with an index of all the ghosted threads, so links to all the arc discussions can be accessed from a single point. Stick a link to that thread in the wiki, under "where do I go to discuss Jim Rosenthal's magnum opus, the Invisibles?"

Bish.

Bosh.

19:15 / 06.02.07

I guess I don't really mind all that. Maybe if I frequented the forum more and felt that specific comics I wanted to discuss were being edged out by a mass Invisibles discussion I could summon up a stronger opinion on it all.

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:32 / 06.02.07

Five threads might not be so bad, and it will provide a sandpit for the more enthusiastic new bods.

Anyway, this is veering offtopic, really. I'd move the discussion back to the kick-off thread in comics, where Flyboy also makes a good suggestion.

19:50 / 06.02.07

Well, as someone who definitely wasn’t around for the first incarnation of the Matrix, or the second or the fifth, this particular knowledge seeker was rather looking forward to having a discussion that didn’t seek either to re-annotate or simply add to past conditions. To be honest, if there was a reading group set up for any old favourite of mine I’d probably at least be interested if I got the sense that there would be enough people involved to generate a good discussion, and I think it’s a bit of a dodgy assumption, Randy, that several pairs of fresh eyes won’t discover something new about a particular piece of work, or a new way of piecing it together between them, your amazement notwithstanding.

I realise that there’s more resonance because of the ongoing discussions about Barbelith’s… purpose… and I can certainly understand why certain people either don’t want or don’t have time to have another discussion of The Invisibles, but that seems quite unrelated to the larger sense of whether that discussion is good for Barbelith, except in the sense that those people are a subset of the members of the board. If the board’s purpose is as wide-ranging as people’s interests, and the people want an Invisibles: The Reading Group thread, then I don’t understand why such a thread should be subject to additional moderation. I personally agree that one thread per story arc or every few issues is too diffuse, but that’s because I think it spreads out the discussion too far, rather than its effect on the image of Barbelith as a whole, and that it’s probably an issue for the Comics Mods to resolve themselves. I’m not sure that the thread’s off to the best start, as a discussion, but the more people involved in seriously contributing to it the better I’m sure it will be, but I’m now slightly put off, personally, by what appears as an unnecessary initial response to a fairly innocuous thread.

So boo hoo really.

19:52 / 06.02.07

Sorry, posted without seeing the last one from Haus.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

20:01 / 06.02.07

My being a general pain in the ass in Barbannoy has solidified a question for me re. renaming:

Would the purpose of re-naming be to shape incoming new members, or to give current board members a bit of a breaking point from Barbelith-as-it-has-been?

Most of the stated reasons to date have to do with attracting more people/not scaring potential new members/not giving Morrison fans excuses to behave poorly, but I'm wondering if there's a kind of a hunger for renewal at work under the surface. Sloughing off the bad energies of banning events of the last 18 months, etc.

The history on the front page runs in rough 3-5 year cycles, so if the last big shift was '03, maybe there's a larger urge for change at work here.

I could be totally wrong here, but I thought it might warrant asking.

20:09 / 06.02.07

In terms of naming, is part of the problem that there isn’t (as far as I’m aware) another comprehensive, dedicated Grant Morrison fansite that would divert, one would suspect, a large part of the new member traffic that does arrive on the shores of Barbelith with quite a fixed view on The Invisibles/Magick? Is there a sense that not just because of the name but the absence of a better candidate that Barbelith acts as the gravity well for those who quite justifiably looking for a board solely in which to discuss Morrison’s past and present work, news, sightings, pillow-talk – whatever – and end up here by default?

I don’t see what the solution would be however, other than someone one here starting that as a dummy site to draw fire (and who has the time?), waiting for someone else or GM himself to set up a board, or splitting the current board in two, with one site purely organised around topics of interest without particular reference to GM, the other designed around providing its members with a constant fix of GM’s unique brand of information-rich-hyper-liquid-love-juice?

Who gets dibs to ‘Barbelith’ in that last scenario I don’t know.

20:15 / 06.02.07

if there was a serious intent to annotate or reannotate the Invisibles, then a wiki could have been set up, or even a move could have been made to reopen the Bomb.

Umm... ahem.

The Bomb was transitioned over to the wiki starting 31 January 2005 (at Tom's request, I think -- I can't remember exactly). It still gets an occasional correction or new annotation -- maybe one edit every three months or so. That's nowhere near as busy as the Seven Soldiers Annotations next door, but it makes a nice adjunct to that one.

Maybe I should spend more time sticking links in Comics...

20:28 / 06.02.07

I'm wondering if there's a kind of a hunger for renewal at work under the surface

I think that's entirely it Matt. That's what all the recent batch of Haus-started threads are about, how do we turn this place into something workable, useable and functional (and stop the older members finally getting fed up and pissed off with the recurring problems and disappearing). I think this is probably impossible without Tom's involvement, sadly, and he's been an absent father for a long time.

Personally speaking, I kind of don't care if Barbelith is good anymore - I haven't got the time or energy to try and maintain standards or apply creativity as I used to (largely in The Temple) - I'm only really posting because I should be doing something else - and the trio of recurring annoyances- banning/admissions/f***ing Invisbles make this all more the case.

Even more personally, and pessimistically, I think the place needs a major overhaul and if Tom isn't going to do it, he should set a shelf life for the place - a year or so for alternative arrangments to be made - and then shut it down.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:29 / 06.02.07

The thing is--and I hate to say this but it's true--such a site would die on its arse within a year (this being a generous margin, I would actually expect death to occur a lot sooner, but let's say a year). What would sustain it? A passion for a now-defunct comic and its attendant magical/cultural/philosophical/theoretical thingsydoo?

Frankly if such a site was to last longer than a few months it would have to branch out--maybe covering related films and TV shows, news and current afairs, theory, other forms of magical practice... and seven years down the line, you'd have people complaining about the superabundance of GMness and wanting to change the name.

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