The palmy freewheeling days of the internet are over. Even at AS/AW. You can't pirate graphics without running into problems with the internet copyright police, you can't plagiarize other people's stories and history posts without being caught via Google, chat rooms are old hat and pop-up blockers stop people from receiving grams. The wind done gone, or something like that.

There are flashing websites with so much going on you could have an epileptic seizure sorting it out. Music everywhere. 3-D graphics that jump around and Do Things. Addictive online games of all sorts, to say nothing of the computer games you can purchase and retain within your dominion and control.

So… so what?

The problem is that AW is attracting a smaller audience than it used to attract. Why? I don't know. All sorts of reasons I suppose. Old time members have found different things to do. The military history nuts have all been called up and sent to forward positions. People who used to have one full-time job with benefits are working two jobs to make ends meet and now they don't have benefits or time for online communities. People prefer to watch reruns of Gidget Goes Berserk rather than work on hoods or spend the evening in a chat room. Maybe My Space is taking every body.

My point, and I do have one, is that the WORLD is not the same as it was in 1998 or 2003 or even 2007. What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work now. And I think it would be vastly more useful to try to figure out "things that make people happy and might keep them at AW" than it is to bicker about carving up the year and who hogs all the festival space.

AW is not My Space and its never going to compete even with Yahoo in terms of online games.

We are talking about carving out festival fiefdoms instead of asking the basic question of "how many festivals do we really need and want?"

To say there are eight worlds so we need eight festivals isn't really the point is it? Maybe we need a festival every month for twelve a year. Maybe we need only one huge festival per year. Maybe we need one every three months that involves two or three worlds sharing the effort and "fun."

I think it would be a great deal more productive to decide how many festivals (whatever you choose to call them) this website can sustain. And only after that should we be worrying about who gets which days of the year.