Jackie's stories would serialize pretty well, I think. The non-chronological ordering might be a bit tricky, but I think that could be addressed with some simple wrappers, to provide context for where we are in the timeline. And the larger stories could actually be broken pretty naturally into smaller chunks, too.

Not that there would be any shortage of other great M:EM content to feature, though, if people weren't keen on Jackie.

Between WotW, Seasons, Fragments, and maybe Phantoms I think we would have at least two full years of weekly serial, which is a nice buffer of things that aren't the bite-sized offering of Archive that Highlighted M:EMories seems to serve.

Two years seems like an almost excessive backlog, but it'll be great to have that much to draw from. Would definitely love to feature some M:EM weekly serials. Would either of you be interested in managing that aspect of the process?

I can write bad limited articles.

You guys sure have been busy.

~SE++

Assuming that I'm understanding things properly, and that you're looking for someone to help with featuring some existing material? Then, yes, I'd be delighted to help.

Effectively, yes. I need someone informed on the nature of the community and their work who'd be willing to select examples they thought were emblematic of the quality that you're all capable of. For the serialized stuff, all you'd have to do is pick a serial, then post one episode of it per week until it's done, then pick another one. (Or maybe send it to me to post. The exact mechanics of this haven't been finalized.)

Well Raven's already handling the first sort of curational thing you mentioned (and we've been working for a while on lists of stuff that makes for a good entry point). But yeah as far as serial stuff goes we have a huge amount of material to choose from. Because we're awesome.

(We should totally serialize Phantoms. Then I'll finally get a chance to read the whole thing.)

Re-releasing Seasons of Dusk is tricky because it's 39 freaking stories, but if we could rerelease some of it (maybe 13 of our favorites?) during October that'd be rad and, obviously, topical.

Honestly though I think the Jackie stories would be an excellent place to start. They're fairly well connected together, don't require a lot of backstory, and are definitely some of the most well loved stories from the project.

The problem with a NEW serial story that's never been seen before is that we'd have to figure out how voting would work in that case. War of the Wheel was released in serial fashion for example but it was revised before its "final" form was added to the archives. Releasing something publicly implies, to my mind, that we're vouching for its completion, but voting on it necessitates it being at least released to other M:EMbers... it's something that I think we could do, but it would take some coordination and planning. I do know of at least one (admittedly stalled) project that could fit the bill though...

One thing that I think we could do in the future is maybe a column like Taste the Magic, a showcase on the creative processes of folks here. Wouldn't have to be limited to flavor/M:EM stuff either--interviews with some of the folks from YMTC would be pretty cool too. That's a lot more work though, obviously.

I volunteer to be the casual play writer for non-EDH related stuff.

I have no idea how this would work but if someone can set up a feasible model I would love to be a part of it.

I believe I stated this earlier in this thread, but for the record: I am against putting our new and in-progress works, by anyone, on the front page.


Oh. I'd forgotten. I've put together two projects for the M:EM that may be front-page material.

• The Great Anniversary Interview Experiment - Long story short:* I have like 6 short interviews with M:EM authors which could be put on the front page.
• Resources for Better Writing - Which I still have things to add to, but contains a lot of various advice, pointers, and links to other advice from users from the M:EM and the old F&S forum on writing.

*Short story long: Name change needed, obviously, but I already made a small interview dealio for NGA's first anniversary. I'd actually planned to do more interviews and such, but never followed up. Maybe I should team up with Raven's weekly M:EMories, but to make the interviews interesting would take more time and besides that my plan was to emulate the Pony Fiction Vault which offered collected pdf and ebook versions to download (which I could do, although I'd have to look up how to make the ebooks -- it is something I'm planning).

Luna the main software I used to put together the epub version of Seasons of Dusk is Sigil, which is free and open source software. Turns out epubs actually just use the same markup largely as html? Anyway producing ebooks isn't too hard. I just... haven't had the time to start on any of the like seven different collections that we COULD put together

The main thing is the covers honestly. I think we could even put together nicer PDFs with a f&os typesetting program that I've found. I haven't had time to poke around in it too much but it seems decently powerful?

Anyway not to derail things but the point is that in the longer term ebook collections of stuff are very much on the table, which means that it's technology available not just to us but to anyone else on the site who could make use of it.

Random article idea:

Every week throw out a card that could be the center piece for a deck. The community at large can post in it's thread a deck idea that features four copies of the chosen card, and then like CotW, it gets voted on the next week. Winners become an article with a blurb about the deck? Okay, that got sillier the more I thought about it. Don't mind me.

~SE++

An interactive feature would be a great idea. It would take a couple weeks to get started, but it'd help encourage the community to interact with the front page and serve as an invitation to anyone reading the front page to join the community. A deckbuilding challenge would be a good way to approach it. I don't see why we couldn't do that.

We could call it "Break the Card!"

hm, that one's been done

"Johnny's Quest"? Not sure how many people would appreciate the pun/reference.

You win the internet.

~SE++

I'd rather not bias it unnecessarily toward the combo deck contingent. Using a card for good value is just as valid an approach as using it for an absurd combo.

That's an interesting point, though: These regular features should have names. Some of them already do, like Card of the Week and M:EMories, but would the NGA Constructed folk like to come up with a name for their feature? How about the DotP people? As a last resort we can use "Deck of the Week", but a strong, engaging name seems better. Card of the Week can get by for its legacy, as it's been a part of the YMtC Community with that name for years, but for new stuff I think some variety would be good, so any suggestions for names would be appreciated. I'm probably going to let the community the feature represents have the final say on what the name is, but suggestions are welcome from anywhere.

Suggestion: We have a "daily" card thing like wizard's does. monday-friday we post a random NGA constructed card and give a short little blurb about what it combos with or who made it or whatever. On the weekend it could be for the COtW.

do we have people willing to write those blurbs every day though?

I also think we should let CotW be highlighted for a whole week. doing something else as well seems cool but CotW should get a fair amount of exposure.

Cotw deserves it's own article where someone can talk about each card probably.