A fact - the future of Yahoo 360 has been in doubt for some time, because Yahoo has chosen to leave it so. This blog could evaporate at any time, without warning, so what use is it? For serious blogging, the answer is "no use at all", but perhaps there is another use, one which requires as few guarantees as we're being given?
Perhaps one. For some time, I've been idly considering getting a group of people together to play improv games, and with warm weather approaching, the parks and forest preserves will become acceptable places to meet - probably more the forest preserves. We'd grab a few books, try a few games and play. Just play, with no instructor.
Not that a good instructor won't teach one a lot, and help one grow, but how many of those are there? How many times have we saved up our money for expensive classes, and then wondered what the money was going for, the instructor's sole contribution to the class being to insult the students, without a single constructive piece of feedback from him to be found? If all we're really getting is a chance to get up and perform, and have others tell us what they enjoyed and what they didn't - what need is there for us to go into class at all? Why not just do it ourselves? For free?
What this blog is going to be for is the setting up of events at which we entertain ourselves. That's about it. If Yahoo does something weird and the blog vanishes, that's a shame, sort of, but what we're going to be losing is old discussions about where we were going to meet for coffee and that kind of thing. The more entertaining reading is going to be elsewhere.
Directions, maps and organizational discussions related to postings on my Upcoming profile, with links to supporting pages, will be what you'll find here, if you find anything at all - which I'm not sure you will. People, when they hear "improv", think John Belushi - I'm not John Belushi, not in any way. I'm kind of shy, kind of mousy, the least likely seeming organizer of something like this, and not really that eager to be the organizer - but nobody else has stepped forward to be that person, so all I can do is see who is interested, and hope they'll be willing to work past a few awkward silences. Are there such people? I don't know. Perhaps this will end up being little more than a bookmarking blog focusing on a subset of my own sites, and a few unrealized creative aspirations.
We'll find out - assuming that there's a "we" to be found in this.
