Yeah, in MONGOLIA!!

(No offense to Mongolians. I have a yurt-avoidance issue.)

Check, no yurts for Nutty.

Mongolia seems like it might be fun for a short while. They have horses. Okay, all I actually know about Mongolia is what I saw in PBS special starring Julia Roberts.

Why are we discussing what TV shows we'd post about? Why not what arts and crafts? Martial arts? Fashion? Makeup?

(I'm tempted to ask if you're taking the piss here, but am assuming you're asking in earnest, and will answer in kind.)

Why?--because originally, we found each other thanks to a TV show, and though there are some who came for the shows/stayed for the Natter (and a subset of those stayed for the natter even after the shows lost them), that's not true for everyone. We have had people state they don't only come for the natter, or stayed as much for the topic as for the natter. Now our original reason for finding each other has been off the air for a year. Tim & Joss's other shows went down in blazes of glory/obscurity, and Angel just ended a week ago today. We've never been here, before. There was always a new clear-to-us potential obsession on the horizon. I am not implying TV show-based analysis was the only, or most important reason that we are us, but it was certainly played a part.

There seems to be an underlying assumption that what TV shows we'd post about matters in some way.

No, there wasn't an underlying assumption. There was an overt (I thought) desire was to find out if it mattered at all, and if so, how much, and again, the reason was, because we've never before been in this position.

If you go back to the early bits of the conversation, Burrell mentioned [wild paraphrase] that although she likes a certain show, and likes the snarky kind of posting it inspires, it would never be enough to sustain a thread. That (and its converse, which I never saw about any show) is what I was wondering about: is there anything out there now, that we want (in a needy way) to talk about? It seemed more sensible to me to get a feel for whether or not the desire was real or assumed, before we went and proposed threads.

is there anything out there now, that we want (in a needy way) to talk about?

This is a big question. Which TV show we might want to talk about is a smaller one.

We have a pop culture sort of a feel, as spun off Buffy which spun of Angel, begatbegatbegat.

Demand pushed for music, although it's not directly related. Demand pushed for movies, closer related. Comics got their foot in the door, through Fray. Technical discussion is here-- it has nothing to do with "we found each other thanks to a TV show."

Your assumption seems to be that we are a general TV-centric pop-culture focussed site.

Are we?

That's the bigger discussion.

It's not really one I care about, because I don't think we're broken, or likely to be broken soon, and our details will shift from moment to moment, and just be expressible in averages.

My reading on the "disconnect" we are having is that those of us who either stopped watching the shows or stopped using the show threads, or both - those of us that stuck around in this community have already gone through the "What is this community without show discussion?" thing in our heads. It's something we went through without a Bureau discussion and I think it just seems obvious to us, you either like the community for the other stuff and you stay or you don't and you don't. That may seem harsh and I am not meaning it to be, but honestly, it should be obvious that lots of the community was not in the Angel thread. Is there really a significant chunk of people that were ONLY in the show threads?

If enough people wanted to really hash out discussions of any show, I think they would and we would be in here having "Should show X get its own thread because 200 natter posts in one night about it seem like a lot" talk. I do not recall ever seeing a request to stop a discussion in natter about a TV show.

Some people started or joined movies, literary, music, whathaveyou in addition to reading/participating in show threads, some people started or joined in place of them.

Here is what I have no doubt about. Any new thread that is started will generate more posts on that topic than the topic is now getting in any combination of threads. Please correct me if I am wrong, but every time we add a thread total board posts go up.

I would like to add that back in the pre-natter days the show threads would be full of hundreds and hundreds of posts that had zero to do with the show.

I've been thinking about this....especially with regard to the ideas of creating links with each other.

Even if we had a magic TV thread that brought us all together, I could bet you it wouldn't bring us all together. Even if the most active posters (at say, 100-200) posting once or twice a day in such a Magic Thread would suddenly make it too high traffic for some of us.

In other news, I totally agree with what msbelle is saying.

Even if we had a magic TV thread that brought us all together, I could bet you it wouldn't bring us all together.

Nope. Strange as it may seem, some of us don't really watch TV.

Here is what I have no doubt about. Any new thread that is started will generate more posts on that topic than the topic is now getting in any combination of threads. Please correct me if I am wrong, but every time we add a thread total board posts go up.

Yes. This is a basic law of network behavior.

ME TV is what brought us together (some later than others), but it is not the reason we stay together. The relationships that have developed on- and off-line are what keeps this place going. Television is secondary.

Not everyone is going to get along, and not everyone is going to know everyone else. It doesn't make us horrible people. There's no mandate that we all like each other. The differences are what make us Buffistae and unique.

I heart what ita said here: ita "Bureaucracy 3: Oh, so now you want to be part of the SOLUTION?" May 26, 2004 11:00:00 am PDT . We're not broken, and I'm much more comfortable letting things evolve naturally at this point. There's a danger of becoming too concerned with the meta of this place at the expense of just enjoying ourselves.

Odd. I just got email from my brother - who is apparently on his way to Mongolia on Sunday. Maybe he can scout out hotels for those of us who don't care for yurts.