Farewell Yahoo, long live the Kraken!

(This message was originally posted to the Kraken Yahoo Group and is being cross-posted here, as noted below.)

Dear Krakenistas -- I'm not 100% sure if this will be my last message here, or even if this message will make it out to the group. I've noticed that a verrrry long lag time has developed on Yahoo Groups over the weekend, with some messages taking many hours or even more than a day to appear on the site. I'm guessing that Yahoo's servers might be overwhelmed with last-minute conversations like this one. 

And I'm not sure when the real cutoff for messages appearing on the site will be, though midnight Pacific time tonight (the 28th) seems like a good guess.

But I'll say a few more words. (And I'll cross-post this in the Yellow Paper forum as well, since it seems like kind of a transitional thing.)

First off, thanks again to Richard for all his hard work on sprucing up the Yellow Paper forum on RussellHoban.org, which is hopefully our new home for these conversations.

To all of you: Please, if you possibly can, do turn on email notifications for the Yellow Paper forum once you've joined it. If you don't want to get too many emails, there is an option to have them bundled into a digest on a daily or weekly schedule, whatever you prefer. As Richard said in his previous message, if you need any help doing this (or anything else involving the forum), just contact Richard via email and he'll guide you through it.

I say that because I think it's the email component of Yahoo Groups that has kept the Kraken alive all these years, and helps us get the word out about things when we need to. Even when the Kraken gets sleepy, it always wakes back up when there's news or something fun to discuss, because people get notified by email. Whereas I think if we have to depend on everyone remembering go to check the website on a regular basis, it'll be a lot harder to keep the old cephalopod from drifting off into the here-be-dragons part of the map.

Finally:

I am so glad and grateful that this community came into being, and to have been a part of it for these past 20 or 21 years, depending on how you figure. And as I said to Richard in an email, to my mind the name "the Kraken" never referred strictly to this Yahoo Group, but to the international collective of Russell Hoban fans and scholars that sprung up around it and the Head of Orpheus. In other words, all of us.

And we are still the Kraken, regardless of whether we connect on Yahoo or RussellHoban.org or Facebook or Twitter or email side conversations or whatever freaky new form of cranial-implant communication is on the horizon in the 2020s. And regardless of whether there is any kind of semi-official members list anywhere.

The Kraken is an idea, and I trust you all with that idea. 

El kraken continúa!

Dave Awl (Kraken founder/moderator)