User blog:Taldin/Maybe Mailbox Monday, Concept

(In the spirit of alliteration, Maybe Mailbox Monday is an idea to foster some community activity and get to know some of you better.)

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One of the hardest things to do sometimes is to get people to contribute and speak up. At one point in my life I was the co-host of an Internet radio show of sorts -- a Master Storyteller's workshop that ran for an hour every Monday for four years. We covered easy stuff at first -- lessons on storytelling, concepts on senses, archetypes, and occasional worldly wisdom advice. As the show went on, we covered topics that were further and further afield, and sometimes we kinda pulled a show out of thin air that only loosely fit the original theme.

Every week we had an open chat room for people to come by and comment, and most weeks we also had a guest, either pre-recorded or phone in, to help us tell stories on a particular topic. What we hoped for was that people would actively participate in the show, since it was a live show, and spark discussion outside of the stories that my co-host/founder had prepared.

In four years, that never happened. Anyone who phoned in only did because we specifically invited them to.

Such is the fickle depth of the Internet -- it is so huge that it is unlikely that you will be stumbled across unless you know where to look. It's a lot like our search for intelligent life; space is big, and only one tiny little frequency has what we're looking for, and we haven't found it yet. Nor have we been found, at least that we're aware of.

But it never stopped us from trying, every week. At the end of the four year run, my friend asked me if I wanted to go another four years. I said, "No thanks!" He wanted to _expand_ the show. He wanted to go on television with it.

I couldn't make that leap. I couldn't commit to another four years doing something that sometimes I did out of a sense of friendship and stubborn tenacity.

The thing I learned the most is that if you can't get people to participate, you're on your own to come up with content. But it never hurts to ask.

And Habitica is built around that sort of community spirit, and it is alive and well despite the software being fairly mature at this point. (Refactoring aside, anyway.)

And so I ask you this, good readers:

Given the topic areas I laid out last week, is there a question you'd like me to delve into in more detail? Or, failing that, you could always get to know me better by asking me something about who I am. But the price of that one is a fair trade -- you have to be able to answer the same question you ask.
 * Thoughtful Tuesdays: Philosophy, Wisdom, Deep Thoughts.
 * Workout Wednesday: Work and Workouts
 * Techie Thursday: How Stuff Works, whether inside Habitica or outside of it.
 * Fantasy Friday: Help write the adventurer's tale by suggesting plot twists!
 * Worldbuilding Weekends: Help out on the Habitica Explorers, Legends and Libraians Organization initiative by suggesting lore entries to start with!

The mailbox is open, and I await your reply.

Kind regards,

Taldin (talk) 00:27, August 30, 2016 (UTC)