future of Looper's Delight (long)

[Violet Xoxox <violet@missviolet.com>]

I've been trying to write something about this all week, but finding time
and strength has been hard.  It's difficult to write this even now, but I
feel compelled.  I don't know how eloquent it will be, since I don't feel
particularly coherent right now, so bear with me.

I know many of you are reeling right now and worrying about what's going to
happen with Looper's Delight.  Will it fall apart?  Will it be abandoned?
I know it's hard not to fret, but please try to have faith.  I need
everyone to, because...

What's going to happen now is exactly what was going to happen anyway.  For
a long time Kim had been frustrated that the site was such a mess and he
had no time to work on it.  Even the times he did update it, he had a tough
time because he didn't know much about HTML; adding even the simplest thing
was hard for him, which is why the site is so jumbled and inconsistent.

He'd been begging me for more than 10 years to help him clean it up.  Every
now and then, I'd make graphics for him and help with layout on the site
using my awesomely bad circa 1998 web skills (the CD ad banners, the
navigational buttons ... ugh, please don't hurt me!  They were cool at the
time, I swear!).  But the main reason I never fixed the site for him was
because it needed to be switched over to CSS, and *I* didn't really have
the skill to do what needed to be done, either.  But it was something we
talked about many, many times.

I've worked on several sites since then and I know much more about site
development than I used to.

Two days before Kim died, I told him I had finally begun site restructuring
for Looper's Delight.  He was SO HAPPY!  I can't even tell you how excited
he was.  For anyone who doubts that Kim still had a passion for LD, I can
tell you that the passion never left.  The fire I saw in his eyes that
night, the joy ... I will never forget that and I wish you could have seen
it.  He was simply stretched thin and his job at Nvidia was so stressful,
there wasn't enough time for him to do everything he wanted. I watched him
wrestle with that for so many years.  You have no idea how frustrated he
was that he couldn't do everything he wanted to do.

In the past I had added an interface to the site to make updating the news
section easier for him, but he never had time to learn how to use it.
(Currently, you'll notice the news page is giving a server error; that's a
result of my moving the interface UNDERNEATH the running site when
restructuring began in order to hide it so that the existing site can still
viewable while I work on the re-org.)  I told Kim that since I already knew
he probably wouldn't have time to give me much input or work on the site
even with the interface added, I was also going to join the list so I could
get input from the community directly and get you involved.  He laughed and
said yeah, that was probably a good idea!

So the upshot is, Kim and I had already agreed that I was going to take
over the day-to-day management of the site and seek input/help from the
community.  I had hoped he would be here to guide me because I don't really
know the sorts of things that are of interest to you, but sadly, well, we
see how that went.  But I was going to rely on the community for much of
that anyway.

So together we can do this.  You know the sorts of things that are of
interest to loop artists.  I know what Kim's vision was, I know the
principles that were important to him, because they're the same principles
by which I run my OWN sites and mailing lists.  We were in absolute
agreement on how mailing lists should be run - and as you've seen for
years, he took great pains to structure the list so that it would be able
to run without him personally babysitting it - and we also had many
wonderful discussions on how we felt news sites should be operated.  I will
miss those discussions so much.

You may not have Kim any more, but I hope you'll find that his spirit lives
on in me.  We were two halves of the same whole.  (Although I am,
admittedly, the more verbose half.)  I hope you can trust that I will take
the site in the direction Kim would want it to go, because I watched him
care about it for the past 14 years and I know how much it meant to him.

The trouble for me at the moment is that having lost Kim now, I won't be
able to get to the actual redesign as quickly as I'd wanted to.  I was
working on it, and now I'm reeling and life as I knew it has come to a
screeching halt.  Not only am I too heartsick to focus on much of anything
right now, but I'm also going to have to work on keeping Kim's personal
sites - KimFlint.com and Annihilist.com - alive in his name.  This is on
top of the work I have to do for other sites on our server and dealing with
my own website, Undented.com.

I haven't given much thought yet to how I'm going to keep up with it all,
but I do have people to help me through this, and I have all of you to give
me input when I'm sorting out the LD stuff.

But for now, things are going continue the way they were and would have if
Kim were still here: the list will continue running the way it has been,
and I will be reorganizing the site behind the scenes and getting some of
you involved when I'm ready.

I hope this gives you some hope for the future during this painful time.

Oh!  I nearly forgot ... although the way the site is physically run is
going to change dramatically (in that it will be able to be updated
regularly when I'm done with the re-org, yay!) the overall look probably
won't change much.  Originally I had wanted to come up with a new design -
nothing overly flashy, but something better than what's there now - but now
that Kim has gone, his mother has asked if we can at least keep the entry
page similar to what it's been all these years because it comforts her and
makes her think of Kim, so we're going to do that.  But it will also
feature a prominent memoriam to Kim.  I don't think anyone would argue that
that's the way it should be.  So it isn't the overall look that will
change, but the way the content is organized and updated, which will make
it much more exciting and interesting for everyone.  I'll be relying
heavily on the community to help with that.

And I'm going to clean up the archives.  When I looked at those, I was
shocked by all the spam!  I wish Kim had told me that was happening - I
could have cleaned that up.  Eesh!

So the site isn't going to suddenly turn all crazy, just be more coherent
and easier to navigate and update.

Okay, I'm done now, and very tired, and I may not have the energy to
respond to replies, but I *am* here and will be reading as much as I can.

Violet
xoxox