LNH/META: To Reboot or Not to Reboot....

Lalo Martins lalo.martins at gmail.com
Fri Oct 28 02:17:47 PDT 2011


On Thursday, 27 October 2011 19:19:55 UTC+2, Andrew Perron  wrote:
> On Oct 27, 9:07 am, Lalo Martins <lalo.m... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Again: I'm not saying we pass a law that nobody is allowed to write the classic Looniverse anymore. That would be silly, for many reasons, ranging from being a bad idea to begin with for the reasons you list, to the fact that it makes no sense to try to make absolute rulings in an intrinsically anarchic group such as we are.
> >
> > What I *am* saying is we shift the primary focus to the “new 20” or whatever it's called. That's what I'll be setting aside time to write for and that's what we should advertise to our friends, and heck, if new readers get bored that we're not writing fast enough to sate them, they can go hit the archives and knock themselves out with top-quality Classic LNH stuff.
> 
> Well, that's the thing.  There's only two ways to "shift the primary
> focus"; make such a rule and try to enforce it... or just put the new
> world out there, and make it interesting enough that people *want* to
> contribute.  I know I'm not going to be moving the bulk of my writing
> time over there just because it's there; I also know that I'm amenable
> to starting something long-term there if I feel like there's something
> I can really dig my teeth into.

You're thinking about an abstract hypothetical group with hundreds of people who don't really talk to each other that much. The reality is less than 10 writers, almost all of whom are already in this thread. So how do we “shift our primary focus”? We just agree to do it. Consensus is the primary governance method in small creative organizations.

Or to put it a different way: I'm not trying to make a rule that nobody can write Classic LNH anymore, I'm trying to form a group of people who agree to write on, and advertise, the new Looniverse.

> > Finally: I also proposed we do a “cowards reboot” like DC did, meaning, we start from a point where there is already some backstory and we use the classic universe as inspiration for that backstory. I wouldn't go so far as saying “everything that happened still happened except where we say it didn't” because DC has proved that doesn't really work (for the fourth time IMO), but we don't need to discard all the backstory either.
> 
> Honestly, I've always hated those.  It was a bad idea when CoIE did
> it, though I can see why they did, but the New New DCU is just
> ridiculous.  I can definitely see the merits of creating a new
> backstory with elements from the old one, but you really do need to
> create something new or it'll just be more confusing.

All right. Let's go with that then. Fleshing out the backstory would be a decent thing to do for the initial cascade-like writing push.

> Indeed. (Although my god, Google Groups, you really need to fix the
> search engine.)

I think Google doesn't have any search technology they can use for Groups.

> Also, on the subject of the New 20: I'd like for a complete story to
> run through a few of them.  How about, in an LNHy metafictional vein,
> someone discovers that their universe is only a few days old?

Or how about fleshing out the backstory, through the use of some traditional framing mechanism, like, say, the LNH going public for the first time, or moving into the LNHQ, or something?

-- Lalo “recently rebooted myself” Martins


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