State of the Block: Sidelines
It’s been a really long time since I made a website. I used to run a fan site for a great series of books called Phantom Stallion. They sound really stupid, I know, but man they were great. As a horse crazy kid there are a ton of flimsy chapter books. Some of them are good, most of them aren’t.
The two big ones that spring to mind are Pony Pals and The Saddle Club, both of which I loved. There was some Thoroughbred one too but I didn’t get into that. It was just fun reading about the adventures of friends who all had horses and could ride them around in their backyard. Thing is, they were all english style. Phantom Stallion took place in Nevada, on a ranch, and while I rarely ride western I love it. A lot of my time was devoted to creating and maintaining that site. We had book summaries, graphics, a really active forum, it was a lot of fun. But then my computer crashed, I lost everything, I stayed away for too long and it all fell apart. I still feel bad about it. I had a great relationship with the author. We would e-mail a lot. But I kept growing up, and very quickly I didn’t have time to devote hours to it anymore. I had high school work and college planning.
That’s why I was so nervous to take on something else. This blog, you see, doesn’t count as a website. It’s all made for you, you just plug in content. I wouldn’t dare try to start another site from scratch. I had considerable help, I’ve forgotten to much, and I did it all on a PC before. I have no idea how to start on a mac. But when times get tough, you need to get out or take a stand.
It took me 2 minutes to come up with the idea. It took me 10 hours to start working on it. It took me 24 hours to get the thing live.
I found out about the midseason reschedule and benching of Community at 7:00 on Monday. At 7:00 I’m only an hour into my 2 and a half hour class. The professor, while nice, is painfully unaware that it’s very easy to look at your phone. It’s even easier when he’s just talking and not showing us how to do things on final cut. So I saw the tweet, I saw the article, and I had to go through a whole range of emotions just sitting in that chair.
I was furious and devastated at the same time. I was going to cancel my plans to watch the Packers and eat pizza with Matt and instead spend so much time in the shower that I’d be in danger of drowning. We had a guest speaker come in who was fine, but the “assignment” she gave us wasn’t relevant to the class and even if it was, I wouldn’t have cared. I didn’t really do it. I just sat there wanting to scream. And I did scream. I got the pizza, I went to Matt’s, I swore and through things and took no pleasure at all in the Packer’s trouncing of the Vikings.
The next day I woke up and went to work with, what I imagine to be, the dulled but hardened look that a man gets when he’s out for revenge and has seen too much. I didn’t care about anything. But with DCCC assignments at an all time low, I started plugging out ideas for my site.
I was really, really apprehensive about this. How can I sink more time into something that’s not school? But how can I love this show so much and not do anything? My solution was a bit of a compromise. I created Greendale Is Where We Belong (dot com), a spin on the classic line that Annie says at the end of the first season finale, as centralized way for people to get information on the Save Community/Six Seasons and a Movie/Occupy NBC/Occupy Greendale campaigns, and all Community campaigns. It would link to other sites and twitters, it would offer information on the basics of getting involved, and it would allow people to discuss what moves we should take.
That (last) night I came home, took the picture for the header, messed with the form, and put together some content. This morning I woke up, inexplicably at 5:00, and true to my old days working on my fan site, I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I set back to work. The site was fine. Not finished, but fine. It needed help. It needed followers and contributors. So I put posts on the two Community live journals I’m apart of and asked two prominent tumblrblogs, Save Community and Community Things to consider taking a look and pimping if they thought it would be a good idea.
What’s the point of this story? As we all suit up, I want to be on the front lines. It probably means there’ll be a little less posting here at the BBOC, but not much. The two don’t really overlap that much. This is personal, Greendale Is Where We Belong is a campaign. I’m still mostly nervous, but I’m also a little excited. I think good stuff can happen.
