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02/03/2010: "#147: Reflections On The Athenaeum V. 1.0, 11/12/2003-9/4/2008"

Music: Benny Goodman
Mood: doing homework/nostalgic

Well, the athenaverse has made it into its second decade and I haven't posted in two months. What's my excuse this time? Stuff, the most important of which is school. Speaking of school, for my taxonomy class, my midterm/final/70% of my grade is to find a website with enough information items and reclassify it. I have proposed working on the Athenaeum not only because it has enough information objects to be useful for this project, but once I redo the taxonomy, I can theoretically implement it on the website. The other thing it has going for it is that it is currently inactive. It went across the sky in a blaze of glory. It was so much fun when we got going and we had active posters and readers- well, there only seemed to be 6 of them, and they all were guys, and they all knew each other, but occasionally we got some outside readers, I think. For awhile there, I honestly thought we could eventually become the new FARK or BoingBoing. It kinda petered out after I moved to LA, but awiggins and I kept posting once in awhile, and the most recent post was by yours truly was in September 2008 and involved a quote from Senator Barack Obama.

Now that the dream is over, it is good to look back on it. The Athenaeum, as constituted, is a time capsule for my friends and I from back in the day. It is a snapshot of the stuff that we thought was interesting, our thoughts on it, and even our flame wars. This was back before the days of Facebook and Friendster and whatnot, when we (I mean, the inestimable prof_booty and awiggins) had to make the site from scratch. It will be good to fix it up and make it presentable again instead of making it a magnet for web-crawling poker nonsense comment-bots while learning a bit about taxonomy as well.

In a nod to the Athenaeum of yore, here's the most disturbing links I found today:
Director of National Intelligence Says It's OK for Government to Kill Americans If They're Terrorists from ABC News
Woman's Cells Were Used To Make Important Cell Line Without Her Consent from New York Times