Hello, All. I hope everyone has been well and productive outside of APF and NSFGE and anywhere else you may frequent. I, however, have been in a hectic and chaotic whirlwind since April and have not had a moment to just be still, except when I'm sleeping (which was also lacking, by the way) until two weeks ago when I took a much needed break -- from everything -- so that I won't embark on my new endeavor in a cranky, near-postal and frenzied state. So thanks (not) to a certain person for forcing me from my rest and enjoyment for the moment necessary to address a few things that have been so misguidedly brought up.
(1) Please refrain from naive conjectures and poorly formed conclusions regarding Movie Poster Authenticating. It is far from abandoned. It is far from "unupdated". And it is far from any single person's personal view about what it ought to be. My absence from the online forums does not mean my absence from MPA. MPA was not built to be a factory to roll out haphazard, unresearched, slapped together authentications on an assembly line. Unlike dealer's sites that steal other people's information to present as their own, the folks at MPA do present authentications that they have actually worked on themselves. As Thierry noted, it is time consuming and tedious work. If you're doing it right, or as "right" as can be considering that this isn't the scientific method for medical research, it's going to be tedious work.
MPA is a repository of information, not a suppository of crap expelled monthly at the dollar store.
It is meant to sit and just be there ready to be accessed and useful at anytime for free without commercial influence. Even if another authentication never gets posted, it will still be there to be helpful for what information it does have up already.
(2) MPA wasn't meant to be "my" website -- although it technically is and I do have final say and I can thumbs up or thumbs down a poster and I am editor, master, commander and chief overlord of it... OK, it is MY website, but that's not the point. The point is, MPA is a collective endeavor and each author has complete control over his/her own authentication and will always own his/her work. That was why MPA was set up as a blog, so that each author can always log into MPA to access his/her work at any time. A person wishing to do an authentication is taking on a responsibility and he/she has a duty to do it with at least some creditable work. One does not need a PhD, but one certainly needs rational thinking, sound judgment and some vetted sources in order to come up with conclusions that can be defended when one's assertions are being challenged.
The nature of the hobby is that there are so few, company-of-origin sourced information and so we have to rely on the information gathered from non-primary sources. That means that if you don't have a care for doing some research, a modicum of detail-orientedness, cogent arguments and a desire to be as creditable as you can, then authentication work is not for you. Linking to other people's work does NOT an authentication make.
So, yes, MPA has standards. If the authentication cannot meet them, it does not get posted. I made the mistake of allowing a couple of shoddy authentication attempts up on MPA in its early days, but eventually took them down when I realized I could not let the desire to be nice and polite hinder me from trying to maintain some kind of quality control.
(3) For those who are critical that no new authentication has been posted recently, I welcome you to become one of the people who are actively trying to give back and do some good in this hobby instead of just talking about what other people should be doing in the hobby. Well done, solid authentications are always desired, needed and welcomed. I can't do this alone. We can either bicker about how MPA should be -- and there have been a multitude of opinions expressed by individual people who have their own ideas of how MPA should be, way before APF's inception -- or we can all work together to make the information available on MPA so that everyone can benefit. Until that happens, it's just a bunch of talk without the walk.
(4) I do not need anyone to "spur" me to do anything. I do what I choose in the priority that I give it. Although some may feel things should be different, MPA and the forums are not my top priority, and they never will be. I work on MPA because of the desire to contribute to the hobby and I participate on the forums because I want to have fun with the hobby among my compatriots who understand the love for colorful bits of movie paper. When these things either consume an inordinate amount of my time or start to interfere with my real work and actual life, they drop even lower on my list of priorities. If this is not satisfactory to some people, perhaps satisfaction should be sought elsewhere.
Now, having written all this, I'm going to go back to my rest and recreation and to spending as much time with my family and friends as I can before I have to leave. I still haven't replaced my dead Powerbook and have been bumming off other people's computers. This means I'm going into hibernation again and will see y'all some time in August or September. Or when I bolster up the energy to kick up some dust. And frak if there doesn't need to be some dust kicked around here. I wish everyone well and much fun and enjoyment in our hobby.
Talk to y'all soon,
Jeannie
P.S. I'm so happy to see Arch (aka Jason No.2) finally on APF. BTW, I do not know how it was determined that Archie was the anonymous coward who posted that racist comment about me on NSFGE, but I assure you, that was not Arch. So let me emphatically clarify: There isn't a racist bone in Arch's leech and he would never post something like that. I consider Jason No. 2 a pal on NSFGE, so, please, let's clear him of this well-intentioned but erroneous accusation.
