Web crawling is one of my favorite recreations. This afternoon I've been looking though web links to movies (mainly classics) and movie stars. I've always been fascinated by the older films as well as somewhat of a movie fanatic from the age of around six or seven. My mother was the one who got me hooked. My father worked out of state coming home maybe three or four times year. My mother would take me to the movies in our small town. Unlike today, they were in those years an inexpensive form of entertainment. What could be even more entertaining was walking home after the movie, taking a shortcut through a cemetary in the dark. I suppose it's fortunate that I was born a Scorpio because I came close to the dead very early on.

Am I rambling? Yes. Because I can. That is a phrase I have picked up on one of the forums (bulletin boards) I frequent regularly these days. We are viewers (I cannot say it's fanship exactly because we often make fun of what we see on All My Children these days) who love to laugh about the terrible show we are currently watching (and sometimes not watching). I love my fellow posters for their awesome writing talent, drawing talent, computer graphics talent, and above all for their wacky sense of humor which meshes well with my own.

Shameless plug for the site (you must register to view and to post and must visit [lurking is fine, posting isn't required but can be a lot of fun] at least once a month to maintain your membership), but you won't be bothered unless you subscribe to a thread (topic) and want to be notified when new posts are added there. But naturally, you must familiarize yourself with the soap opera All My Children to appreciate what goes on in our forum.

Lobster_and_Branch

The story of how we came to be is funny. The founder got her act together after a bunch of members of another AMC related site (which we promptly christened TBTSRN, the board that shall remain nameless) were severely reprimanded by the moderator there. She threatened to close our thread down if we didn't shape up so about 75 of us decided to ship out leaving behind five or six members who wondered where all the fun went. The really amazing part of this story for me is how quickly so many of us reconvened at the new forum. Ah, the power of the web.

I am reminded of the line from the movie Speed after the elevator falls for the first time. A passenger asks the passenger who pushed the down button, "What button DID you push, Bob?" I wonder if anyone at the other forum ever asked the moderator there, "What button DID you press (that caused us to lose seventy-five members)?" I suspected the moderator was suffering from a bad hangover after New Year's Eve celebrations. At least, I hope she had a good excuse.

So the funny people jumped ship and went to lobster_and_branch (which is an inside joke that is probably explained somewhere in the dictionary of terms there). We also have a fanfiction thread going in the forum and I have been contributing a story "Heart of the Matter" there in installments. As long as someone keeps asking, "And then what happened?" I'll keep posting chapters until my tale has reached a natural stopping point.

Some very talented writers are posting there, too. So I have fun reading their work as well as the fun of writing my own. The forum administrator has a wacky humor that produces hilarious graphics, surreal takes on the soap. Another writer is doing a diary for one of the main characters--Ryan Lavery, for all who watch/have watched AMC--that contains some seriously funny strikethroughs.