December 7, 1999

(Note : the scheduled update has been pushed back, since this was written, to February 2, 2004. However, with new members coming in, updates may be coming sooner than we expected. If you'd like to be notified about them, when they occur, click here).

In the next few days, we'll introduce a few simple recipes for the Saturnalia holiday. The only holdup, is that I have to get home to pick up a new mixer, as the old one burned out, delaying some needed kitchen testing. There is a small amount of material - a few paragraphs - to be added to the end of the "Uniform Base Code of Morality" discussion and "Interview", before we cut out for the holidays, because there are a few things we just can't bring ourselves to just leave hanging. A few rituals will be added to the Non-Christic Counterpoint section, in order to make it a more credible effort.

But aside from that ...

We've started getting some good feedback on this site, we've just starting getting registered on the search engines and listing sites, and so, now, we're going to do what any struggling young group would do with its site, at this point. We're going to let it sit for two years.

"Huh?" is the usual response. Well, we have our reasons. Remember that discussion, of how it is that this site got its name ? The concept of many people creating the tradition, each building on what the others had done ? Well, in our view, if our site makes a difference, people will read it, think about it, and have things to say in return. In two years, that something should have taken solid form, and responding to it will take our site in a new direction that we can't imagine today, because we haven't heard from a lot of you, yet. Of course, if our site doesn't make a difference, if people aren't reading it, or aren't thinking about some of the ideas we've tried to discuss, here, then why bother ?

The way we see it, if there is interest in this material, two years of being listed on a variety of webrings, and being mentioned in an upcoming newsletter outside of the Internet, will have provided this effort of ours with plenty of time to prove itself, and those who want to see more, with plenty of time to respond. At the end of that time, on Feb.2, 2002 (God, that sounds so far off) we'll take stock of the responses we've gotten, and decide for ourselves where the effort should go from here.

Already, we have some sense that the emphasis would shift from the more theoretical and philosophical one we have started with, to a more cultural one, now that we've laid a little groundwork for at least one of the viewpoints underlying future efforts. But, I guess you could say, now that we've printed up the invitations, let's see if anyone wants to come to the party. If we see little feedback, we may touch the page up a little, and leave it as a memorial to a well-intentioned, but obviously ill conceived effort, but the added material will be measurable in pages, not megabytes. If we see a lot, aside from answering the philosophical points raised during the interim, our efforts will be focused on the following : an expanded mythology section, a literary section, and a much expanded section for ritual, tying in to both the philosophy and mythology sections, with an extensive section for ritual food (with recipes).